What is a Requirements Management Plan?

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In this quick post, I’d like to define the term “Requirements Management Plan”.

Simply put, “Requirements Management Plan” refers to:

A document (or set of documents) that define how the requirements for a software project will be managed.

Requirement management plan outlines the guidelines for creating requirements documents, types and attributes of requirements to be included in such documents, as well as the processes for change control and requirements traceability.

Here’s some more info about requirements management plans.

Notes on Requirements Management Plan:

• A formal requirements management plan is usually created for large projects that follow traditional waterfall methodologies. Check out this article for more details on a formal plan – such as what to include, sample format, etc.
• Agile projects seldom create a formal requirement management plan.
• Hybrid projects (i.e. some combination of Agile and waterfall methodologies) may or may not create a formal requirement management plan.
• Even when a formal requirements management plan is not created, it is still a good idea to create and share the corresponding information across the project team. At the minimum, this information should include:
  • How requirements will be documented
  • Who is responsible for requirements
  • How changes will be handled

Benefits of Requirements Management Plan:

Requirements management plans help the entire project team to be on the same page on requirements related matters. As a result, they can help ensure:

• Better communication and teamwork on requirements.
• This can increase the odds of project success – including meeting customer needs well, and achieving faster time-to-market.
• These benefits are especially true for large projects that involve multiple, globally distributed functional units.

FYI: More than 100 companies (Fortune 500s to growing startups) use Accompa Requirements Management Tool to achieve better communication and teamwork on requirements. To find out whether Accompa can help your team too, check out the product tour or request free trial.

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Michael Shrivathsan

I'm your author, Michael Shrivathsan, an expert in requirements management with successful experience at several innovative companies in Silicon Valley, USA over the past two decades. I'm also a USPTO patent recipient. For my day job, I'm the VP of Product Management at Accompa, we make the popular requirements management software.

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