A requirement is a service, function or feature that a business or customer needs which is specified for the purpose of clarifying and communicating the required capability. It is important to understand the type of requirement being specified.
Is the stated requirement a business need, customer need, or a particular stakeholder group need? To provide clarity and context to the issue, requirements are often categorized by different levels and types.
According to PMBOK 5, the primary types of requirements discussed include:
- Business Requirements – Describe the higher-level needs of the organization as a whole, such as business issues or opportunities, and reasons why a project has been undertaken.
- Stakeholder Requirements – Describe the needs of a stakeholder or stakeholder group, where the term stakeholder is used broadly to reflect the role of anyone with a material interest in the outcome of an initiative and could include customers, suppliers, and partners, as well as internal business roles.
- Solution Requirements – Describe the features, functions, and characteristics of a product, service, or result that will meet the business and stakeholder requirements. Solution requirements are further grouped into functional and non-functional requirements.
- Functional Requirements – Describe the behaviors of the product.
- Non-functional Requirements – Describe the environmental conditions or qualities required for the product to be effective.
- Transition Requirements – Describe temporary capabilities, such as data conversion and training requirements, and operational changes needed to transition from the current state to the future state.
Requirements Breakdown Structure in Project Management
In the process of starting a project, you might need to identify the business requirements that link to what the project really is about and what stakeholder’s needs it is going to be addressed. We can structure these six categories of requirements into a requirements breakdown structure (RBS) as shown below:
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Project Management: Different Types of Requirement
Note That:
- Project requirement focuses on aspects of project execution, such as the actions, processes, or other conditions the project needs to meet.
- Quality requirement is a kind of non-functional requirement which is a condition or capability to be used to assess conformance by validating the acceptability of an attribute for the quality of a result.
