What is a Requirement?
When we’re little, we are SO good at identifying what we want, what we don’t want, and what we need.
“I want pizza.”
“I don’t want to stop playing and come inside.”
“I need help putting on my shoes.”
I want, I want, I want… We use those words so much when we’re little. We have an end goal in mind and so we express the desire to achieve it.
Over time, as we become adults, this expression falls by the wayside a little bit. We don’t readily express, “I want…” or “I need…” In fact, some people come to view needs as weaknesses and wants as selfishness. This social conditioning is grounded in the belief that putting our needs and wants above the needs and wants of others is wrong. Even if we know that the concept of putting on our own air mask before assisting others applies in way more situations than just loss of cabin pressure.
But, as the American businessman Farrah Gray notes, “Everything we want is on the other side of fear.”
Expressing our wants and needs can feel vulnerable. When we make this type of declaration, we open ourselves up to the new and unknown. That can be scary!
Requirements in the Business World
In business, these needs and wants are known as requirements. As an organization, what do you want to accomplish? What do you need in order to achieve that?
The founder of a company should have a clear idea of why they started their business in the first place. Maybe they wanted to be their own boss or help the homeless or solve a specific problem or fill a gap in the marketplace. Whatever the case may be, there’s a story on the other side of the want – fueling the forward motion, driving the desire.
Requirements, then, help to define the wants and needs that will allow that founder to achieve their end goal – what achieving it will include, what it will not include, how the company is going to do it, and who is going to do it.
Requirements help us discover what we need in order to achieve our goal as well as determine the clear, effective steps we will take to get there.
The Project Management Institute’s Project Management Body of Knowledge 6th Edition defines a requirement as, “a condition or capability that is required to be present in a product, service, or result to satisfy a contract or other formally imposed specification.”
Without determining requirements, it’s impossible to say whether that end goal has been met.
The Importance of Requirements
At the end of the day, requirements ask us to step back into that childlike state where we expressed our wants and needs without abandon. If we return to the founder example –
Why do you want to be your own boss?
Why do you need to help the homeless?
Why do you want to solve that problem?
Why do you need to create the product that fills the gap in the marketplace?
If you can’t figure out or describe why you want something, then why are you taking your time and your energy and your resources and money to achieve that goal?
With that clarity comes nuance. It’s this nuance that allows us to define the “conditions” or “capabilities” that the PMI’s definition of requirement describes. And within this nuance, there are also levels – from high level requirements all the way down to the nitty gritty.
Types of Requirements
The PMI’s Body of Knowledge 6th Edition notes that there are three different types of requirements on projects:
Business Requirements
Business requirements describe why the project is being undertaken. These are high level wants and needs and help to clarify what success looks like for the business as a whole.
The founder of a fair-trade coffee shop may have the following business requirements:
Each order takes less than 5 minutes to complete
Profit margin is 35% on coffee drinks
All coffee beans are sourced fair-trade
User Requirements
User requirements describe the needs of a stakeholder, user group or customer. These are detailed desires that are expressed from the user’s point of view and are often created with the help of user stories.
A customer at the fair-trade coffee shop may have the following user-based requirements:
There are two non-dairy milk options
Drinks can be made hot or cold
There are at least five flavor syrup options with one sugar free option
There is a dark, light, and decaf coffee bean option
Technical Requirements
Technical requirements describe the features, functions, and characteristics of the product, service, or result that will meet the business and user-based requirements. These are the nitty gritty specifics that need to be done in order to achieve success.
The functional needs at the fair-trade coffee shop may include:
Steamer on espresso machine is set between 150- and 155-degrees Fahrenheit
3 pumps of syrup for medium, 5 pumps for large drinks
Coffee beans are ground “made to order”
Brewing methods include drip, pour over, French press, espresso machine
Recently, a participant in one of my accountability groups shared a story about Elon Musk in which he described how we do so many things simply because we’ve always been doing them. We do things in a certain way because that’s how we know how to do them. But when we come into our wants and our needs, we may learn that we’re doing these things to fulfill someone else’s requirements.
Before they opened their own coffee-shop, the founder in the example above may have worked at a café that placed value on conversations over drink order expediency or that didn’t consider supporting fair-trade to be of importance. Without asking themselves why they wanted to open a coffee shop, they may have never landed on the nuance that led to the right requirements for them. They may have stayed on the side of fear, never crossing over to achieve what they truly desired.
So, I encourage you to embrace the nuance. As you kick off your next project or assignment – ask yourself, “Why?” The answer might just be the secret to your success.
