Customer requirements checklist

This customer requirements action plan is composed for all professionals who would like to gather, analyze and
manage the requirements necessary to produce products matching business needs, vision and wishes of their clients.
This customer requirements action plan can work for different industries and includes recommendations and tips on
the following:
1) General customer requirements capture;
2) Customer requirements analysis;
3) Customer requirements management;

General customer requirements capture:

 Study customer’s business needs, vision and ideas.
 Identify and interview all stakeholders to discuss and take into account their needs.
 If required, establish requirements workshop (focus group) to perform the all-round customer requirements
gathering.
 Apply techniques of usage scenarios (use case modeling) and prototyping if possible/required.
 Provide customers with customer requirements examples to facilitate their choice on some problematic points.
 Establish a common general understanding with the customer on the scope of the project.

Customer requirements analysis:

 By results of the requirements capture, ensure that you know enough for making practice-related customer
requirements definition that converts qualitative explanations into quantitative terms.
 Create the customer requirements tree to decompose and convert broad customer requirements into more specific
and systematized terms.
 Classify customer requirements and satisfaction levels by importance and criticality.
 Finalize requirements for the product by outlining its expected goals and functions in points.
 Formulate the scope in documented and measurable manner (make a product scope statement).
 Ensure that product scope statement provides both parties with clear understanding for identifying proposed
changes as what are in or out of the scope.
 Create customer requirements specification – make them documented, actionable, measurable, checkable, related to
customer needs, with appropriate level of details to use this specification as a baseline for practitioners (special
customer requirements specification template may help).
 Ensure that there is meaningful baseline for ongoing project planning.
 Ensure that you obtained a checklist (customer requirements document on critical deliverable content) that can be
used for static testing the deliverable.
 To conduct statistics and researches on customers’ requirements fill the customer requirements matrix that
summarizes the information.

Customer requirements management:

 Ensure that you have a system of measurements to determine and track the status of the requirements.
 Prepare all customer requirements document templates to formalize gathering, analyzing and specifying the
requirements.
 Make sure you have a person leading, supervising and guiding the whole process of customer requirements
defining and specification.
 Make sure that you have a person responsible for working and negotiating with the customer to identify all
requirements.
 Make sure you have a person responsible for analyzing and interpretation the gathered requirements.
 Make sure you have a person responsible for evaluating requirements in terms of feasibility and their impact on the
project scope.
 Make sure you have a person responsible for maintaining a matrix of all customer approved requirements and the
requirements change control process.
 Make sure you have a person responsible for verifying that the delivered product satisfies the approved
requirements (QA).
 Ensure that customer understands the importance of the scope management.
 Ensure that product scope is understood and singed by the Acceptor(s).
 Define if the scope is fully stable, and if no, which elements have the highest risks to be changed.
 Ensure that you have certain rules for making changes in requirements and product scope management – how
change requests will be handled, evaluated, accepted and implemented.