Collecting Requirements

Collect Requirements is the first process in the Project Scope Management Knowledge Area and the second process in the Planning process group. You might recall from Chapter 1 that the purpose of the Project Scope Management Knowledge Area is to describe and control what is and what is not work of the project. This is the first process where we get into the meat of the Planning processes and get down to defining what the final product or service of the project will look like—therefore, we’re starting off by defining what is included in the work of the project.

In practice, you will likely perform the Define Scope process before the Collect Requirements process. Deliverables must be identified before you can document their detailed requirements. The project charter, an input to this process, does capture some of the high-level requirements of the project, but they are not usually sufficient enough to jump into requirements gathering. For the exam, remember that Collect Requirements comes before Define Scope. We’ll discuss Define Scope in the section “Defining Scope” later in this chapter.