How Important of Requirement to the Project?

Requirement is one of the crucial steps for forming a project. Most of the time requirement will be defined at the first stage of the project since it is the part that helps project manager to plan and schedule for whole project. Without a well-defined requirement, project manager cannot well-plan for resources and budget, team members will not exactly know in detail what they are going to achieve and finally there is no way to validate that this project is satisfied.

It is very important in the planning state to know all the detail of requirement since it is directly related to the design of the developer especially in the software or application development project. Once it was already designed, changes or alter the requirement later can cause of lot of affects in terms of cost and time. Requirement can come from many sources, from the needs of users itself or from the business aspect. Project manager would be the key responsible for transferring requirement from users to the developer.

As in my experience from working in AIS, I believe that in the software and application development industry, getting requirement is the most important part and takes the longest of time for a whole project. There is a project in my organization that invests in purchasing new software to support new service. Software will be customizes according to customer requirement with free of charge only first time at the product delivery. All requirements from the user have been gathered at the project start up. Unfortunately, there is no review session and make understanding between users and developer. As the software delivered, there are quite numbers of requirements that misunderstanding between users and developer. Some missing software functionalities are required from users that force to change request phase even if they just launched this new software for a months and actually those changes already raised by some users in the requirement phase already. It is the nonessential cost that we can prevent by giving more priority to the requirement clarification and making more understanding between developer and users.

Requirement definition is a difficult task but very important for a successful project. Requirement is also a communication intensive process. Developer and users always have different backgrounds, vocabularies and preferences. This make this stage more complex and difficult for project manager.