Project Business Requirements Gathering

Project Business Requirements Gathering

During the Requirements gathering phase of a project the business requirements must be defined. These include information about what the system is expected to do, what the users will do, and what the security requirements are. The business requirements will help define the technology requirements which should be determined in the next project phase, design requirements phase. Business and technical requirements can be categorized in the below areas:

• Business Administration Requirements - Includes requirements for a Business Continuity Plan, Disaster Recovery Plan, incident process. Considers when the project needs to be complete and other needs such as training.
• System - Questions about the overall system requirements.
• Data - Evaluates data being created, stored, or used by the system, the type of data, and what the needs of the data are such as security and retention.
• Access Control - Examines who accesses and manages the system and information along with how the access is achieved according to the needs of the system. This includes:
• Customer/user interface and accounts on the application
• Administrator interface and accounts on the application
• Administrator access and accounts on the servers
• Other accounts such as account allowing application to access a database or service accounts.
• Hardware servers - What servers or computers will be used to support this system.
• Code writing - What code needs to be written and to what standards.
• Interconnecting systems - What other systems this system will need to connect to.

This document will provide questions that can be used to help establish both business and technical requirements to support a project. It will also briefly outline what should be done to determine whether the project is justified. This document does not cover all possible business requirements but covers many of the major ones that involve functionality, stability, and security. It should help the reader focus on what is required to define the business functionality of the project.