2. What Is Involved in Collecting Requirements for a Project? Why Is It Often Difficult to Do?

1. What is involved in project scope management, and why is good project scope management so important on IT project?

​Project scope management involves planning the project scope in a scope management plan, defining the project scope in a project scope statement, and developing a work breakdown structure (WBS) decomposing and outlining the tasks involved in the project and their planned completion times.

​Clients will always modify the requirements for a project at some in such a way that the scope will be impacted. It doesn’t matter how well designed the prototypes, how thoroughly the requirements are documented, there is invariably disconnect between what the client actually needs and what they have helped define. The idea of holding the client to the defined scope is impractical. It doesn’t matter how well scoped a contract you hand them with their signature on it; the software doesn’t deliver what they need. A project manager with a great deal of diplomacy is needed in these instances in order to get the client to understand that the scope creep will require de-scoping something out of the project, increasing the cost, or extending the deadline by having a scope-change process in place.

2. What is involved in collecting requirements for a project? Why is it often difficult to do?

​Collecting requirement for a project involves defining and documenting the features and functions of the products for the project as well as the processes used for creating them. The project team creates requirements documentation and a requirement traceability matrix as outputs of the requirements collection process. There are several ways to collect requirements: interviewing stakeholders; holding focus group, questionnaire and survey, etc. For software development projects, prototyping and document analysis are common techniques for collecting requirements.

​Even though there are many ways to collect requirements, people who work on software projects have considerable...