Question

1. After organizing and setting up a requirements prioritization process, your executive management (e.g., CEO) keeps submitting an “important client” request or “one more last” request. How should you, as a project manager handle the situation? (This question is from your text book- Problem 4 on page 35)

Answer 1

Although it is crucial for a project manager to determine the project requirements beforehand the planning process; but sometimes, they might get some additional requirements from the management or client after starting the project leading to scope creep. Requirement specification are very important for the successful completion of a project, but due to the inability of clients or management in understanding the project requirements, they need to keep on adding new requests during the software development process. Although these revisions/additions are part of the project management process, but recurring changes/addition in the requirements can lead unnecessary wastage of time, money, energy, as well as other resources.

The same situation might have taken place in the mentioned scenario, due to which the executive management is adding new requests in the project after the completion of requirements prioritization process. This would be making the job of software engineers very difficult as they need to revise the entire prioritization and development process due to these frequent requests. Therefore, being the project manager, one should take necessary action measures to handle the situation. As a part of this step, the manager needs to review the request for requirements placed by the management and check whether they are crucial for the project.

If the manager finds out that the requested requirements are not valid and are being rejected, then he/she needs to discuss the same with the management. On the other hand, if the manager finds out that the request is valid and required to be considered for the project, then he/she should call for a meeting with all the internal and external stakeholders of the project to discuss the revised scope of the project. The project manager needs to perform detailed analysis of the client expectations to set the new requirements. It would help them to gather all the necessary information regarding project requirement at a single time and minimize/mitigate the need for new requirements. Besides, it would also help in reducing the reworks and subsequently result in successful completion of the project.