Following a Needs Assessment, a Requirements Definition is the next logical process.

This encompasses the tasks that go into determining the needs or conditions to meet for a particular project, taking account of the possibly conflicting requirements of the various stakeholders, such as beneficiaries or users.

Requirements Definition is an early stage in the more general activity of requirements engineering which encompasses all activities concerned with eliciting, analyzing, documenting, validating and managing specific requirements pertaining to a specific project or search.

Studies have shown that as many as 4 out of 5 software development projects go over time, over budget or don’t deliver expected results.  With such long odds, it pays to put in the effort upfront to minimize the risk of failure. The question is, how is this achieved?  Some topline tasks Nuvalo explores in all such situations:

• Focus and clarity
• A format for specifying requirements
• Highly trained and capable personnel
• Accuracy
• Minimizing the risk of errant interpretation