4.8. Key Terms
Key Terms
- Assignable: Who will do the work? Can people be identified who have the expertise in the organization to complete this work? Or can the expertise be hired from outside of the organization?
- Business Requirements: The needs of the sponsoring organization, always from a management perspective. Business requirements are statements of the business rationale for the project.
- Functional Requirements: Describe the characteristics of the final deliverable in ordinary non-technical language. They should be understandable to the customers, and the customers should play a direct role in their development. Functional requirements are what you want the deliverable to do.
- Non-Functional Requirements: Specify criteria that can be used to judge the final product or service that your project delivers.
- Project Charter: project definition or project statement is a statement of the scope, objectives, and participants in a project. It provides a preliminary delineation of roles and responsibilities, outlines the project objectives, identifies the main stakeholders, and defines the authority of the project manager.
- Project Scope Planning: Concerned with the definition of all the work needed to successfully meet the project objectives. The whole idea here is that when you start the project, you need to have a clear picture of all the work that needs to happen on your project, and as the project progresses, you need to keep that scope up to date and documented in the project’s scope management plan.
- Realistic: Is it realistic that the organization can achieve this project, given its talents and resources? This is a very important consideration for businesses of all sizes. Yes, it would be great to produce a new driverless car, but is that realistic given the resources that the organization has available?
- Regulatory Requirements: These can be internal or external and are usually non-negotiable. They are the restrictions, licenses, and laws applicable to a product or business that are imposed by the government. They required compliance for all, and standards must be met.
- Scope Evolution: Refers to changes that all stakeholders agree on, and that are accompanied by corresponding changes in budget and schedule. Scope evolution is a natural result of the kind of learning that goes on as a project unfolds.
- Scope Statement: The document that defines the project’s scope, is a major part of the initiation phase.
- SMART: An acronym for Specific, Measurable, Assignable, Realistic, and Time-Related. The smart criteria have been applied in many different areas of management, including project management. Let’s take a look at each of Doran’s criteria as they apply to project management.
- Specific: A project needs to be specific about what it will accomplish. Unlike many organizational goals, the goal of a project should not be vague or nebulous.
- Technical Requirements: Emerge from the functional requirements to answer the questions: how will the problem be solved this time and will it be solved technologically and/or procedurally? They specify how the system needs to be designed and implemented to provide required functionality and fulfill required operational characteristics.
- Time-Related: When will the project be completed and how long will it take? These criteria can be very useful when defining a project. If the description for a project does not meet all these criteria, then it is time to go back to the drawing board and make sure that what is being described is really a project, rather than a program or strategic goal.
- User Requirements: Describe what the users need to do with the system or product. The focus is on the user experience with the system under all scenarios. These requirements are the input for the next development phases: user-interface design and system test cases design.
- Weighted decision matrix: A decision matrix is basically an array presenting on one axis a list of alternatives, also called options or solutions. On the other axis is a list of criteria, which are weighted depending on their respective importance in the final decision to be taken.
