Organizations across industries build IT infrastructures to store, manage and transfer data for a wide variety of reasons, such as business planning, financial forecasting, operations management or customer relationship management.

In simple terms, data is what helps businesses measure their success, improve their productivity, plan for the future and manage their day-to-day operations. For this reason, any IT risk that causes a data loss or a major disruption in their IT infrastructure is considered a disaster.

Data is more fragile than we think. It can be corrupted, hacked, stolen or accidentally deleted; it can be destroyed by power outages, water damage or earthquakes. There’s so much that might go wrong that, if you don’t have an IT disaster recovery plan in place, the damage could be irreparable. Action must be taken immediately.

What Is Disaster Recovery?

The term disaster recovery refers to the strategies, tools, processes and guidelines that are used to restore normal functioning of the IT infrastructure of an organization after an IT disaster occurs. These disaster recovery elements are usually described in an IT disaster recovery plan.

What Is an IT Disaster Recovery Plan?

An IT disaster recovery plan is exactly what it sounds like—a plan to respond when something dire happens to your IT system. It is made up of policies and procedures and notes the tools necessary to enact the plan and save or recover the technology infrastructure, systems and data of your IT program.

When formulating disaster recovery, it is assumed that the main area where your IT is located is not salvageable, at least not immediately; therefore, the plan speaks to the process of restoring data and services to another IT site that is workable. The site of the original incident is not of primary concern.

Organizations are encouraged to have a holistic pre-disaster plan as it saves money in the long run. It is believed that for every dollar spent beforehand you save four times as much if responding after the event. So consider planning tools and additionally fail-safe investments.

What Are the Most Common Causes of IT Disasters?

There’s a variety of IT risks that might affect the IT infrastructure of an organization. Here are some of the most common ones.

• Natural disasters: There are major natural disasters such as earthquakes, fires or floods that can affect physical IT assets such as servers or hardware.
• Power outages: Most IT assets depend on the availability of power. Major power outages might result in loss of data or IT services outages.
• Cyber attacks: Data breaches, malware, and other criminal activity that affect the integrity of an IT infrastructure.
• Pandemics & Epidemics: These external events affect the human resources which are key to the IT operations of a business.
• Man-made disasters: IT assets can be stolen or damaged by people. Similarly there’s the risk of human error that can cause data loss.

What Should Be Included In a Disaster Recovery Plan?

We sometimes can stop disasters from happening, but we can certainly plan for recovery. Just like any project plan, an IT disaster recovery plan is made up of pieces.

Recovery Point Objective (RPO)

The term recovery point objective refers to the amount of data that a business is willing to lose with respect to the last backup. It’s important to define what the RPO for your organization is to establish the frequency of data backup, which could be from hours to days. The RPO should be defined and recurrent backups should be performed before a disaster event, so when disaster happens, the RPO will be met.

Recovery Time Objective (RTO)

The recovery time objective is the time limit that an organization establishes for an IT infrastructure downtime. Like RPO, it is a key objective for any disaster plan, as these two goals determine the level of effort, resources and budget that will be needed for the disaster recovery plan.

Disaster Recovery Site

A recovery site is a remote location that backs up the data from your original IT infrastructure and replicates its functioning. If a disaster event occurs, you can resume the IT operations of your organization by switching to the disaster recovery site.

There are different types of disaster recovery sites known as cold, warm and hot recovery sites. The difference between them is the capabilities that they offer, with cold sites being a limited recovery site that provides power, networking and cooling to hot recovery sites that are a mirror version of the original IT infrastructure.

Personnel

Like any project or plan, an IT disaster recovery plan needs resources like the people that will execute the tasks that are needed to bring your IT operations back on track. It’s important to describe the roles and responsibilities of your team in the case of a disaster.

IT Asset Inventory

An effective disaster recovery plan should include an inventory of all the IT assets that are needed to run your IT operations such as software, hardware, cloud or internet of things (IoT) assets.

Data Backup Plan

A data backup plan explains how data will be backed up and how often. A data backup plan should include details such as the exact process for data backup such as a point-in-time snapshot, whether the data backup will be carried by the organization using its own infrastructure or using a third party backup service (BaaS), among other important details to understand how data backup will be carried out.

Restoration Procedures

Besides backing up data, a disaster recovery plan should include a contingency plan to respond to the various causes of IT disasters. For example, a disaster recovery plan should describe the actions that should be taken after a cybersecurity attack, or a natural disaster that compromises the servers.

Types of Disaster Recovery Plans

Once you have a solid IT disaster recovery plan you’ll need tools and solutions to implement it. Here are the most commonly used IT disaster recovery tools and solutions.

• Virtualized Disaster Recovery Plan: This is a type of disaster recovery plan that relies on the use of offsite virtual machines (VM) that allow the creation of a replica of an IT infrastructure. Virtual machines are ideal for organizations with strict RTOs and RPOs as they allow for quick recovery and constant data backup.
• Network Disaster Recovery Plan: There are some organizations that rely on network IT assets such as routers, wireless access points, hosts and servers. A network disaster recovery plan focuses on the activities that are needed to restore such assets, or alternatives to be used to mitigate the impact of their downtime.
• Cloud Disaster Recovery Plan: Instead of using a disaster recovery site, a cloud disaster recovery plan consists in backing up data using cloud services. While it requires a third-party to be involved, it’s usually a more cost-effective solution.

Why Is It Important to Create a Disaster Recovery Plan in IT?

As we move deeper into a digital world, the need for IT systems has become more pronounced. Just over the last few decades, there’s been a huge migration from analog to digital. The advantages have been detailed, but the risks are not always self-evident as people uncritically embrace the new.

We put a lot of faith into our technology, but the truth is that our tech is not infallible. They break and fail all the time. The more we place our well-being, and that of our businesses, on their backs without safeguards, the more we’re asking for trouble.

There is almost a religious zeal when talking about technology and how it’s the cure to all our ails. If only we could remove the human component, machines would usher us into a new age. This magical thinking is dangerous. It romanticizes technology and denies the fact that machines and software are not perfect. They make mistakes, so we have to have a contingency plan.

Business Consequences

While we can control our corporate attitude towards the technology that helps us do our business, the minds of our customers are not as malleable. They expect products and services to be perfect. They don’t want to see how the sausage is made. Therefore, knowing technology can crash, companies need to have an IT disaster plan to keep delivery to their customer base uninterrupted.

This again speaks to the bottom line. If a technological issue occurs, it’s likely to result in the loss of some customers. That might not seem too high a price to pay, but retaining customers is not so easy, and rebuilding trust is an uphill battle. Therefore, an IT contingency plan will protect you from having the damage bleed out to customers.

Outside of your customers, losing your data impacts the productivity of your employees. The instability resulting from an IT disaster has ramifications beyond hardware and software. It leads to lost revenue and a damaged reputation on top of the loss of data.

How to Make an IT Disaster Recovery Plan

When creating the plan, take these things into consideration.

• Have emergency contacts for staff and external contacts, including developing a notification network to reach out effectively.
• Try and figure out what the scope of the recovery will be.
• Get a disaster recovery team and note each member’s responsibilities. This will include having a team leader and a management team responsible for the process.
• Enable the recovery and continuation of critical technology, infrastructure and systems.
• Focus on the information and/or technology systems supporting critical business continuity.
• Keep all essential business aspects functioning despite significant disruptive events.
• It’s considered a subset of a business continuity plan.

Free Templates That Can Help with IT Contingency Planning

Building an IT disaster recovery plan is a big endeavor. There’s a lot to take into account and track. To help you get a foothold, ProjectManager has dozens of free project management templates, including some that are designed for just this purpose.

IT Risk Assessment Template

Knowing what might happen will inform your plan when responding to IT damage. If you can identify risk to your IT, and then you can preemptively plan and assign a team member to lead the initiative. The free IT risk assessment template collects all the data you’ll need to note how the risk can impact your IT and how to potentially control it.

Issue Tracking Template

Trouble usually doesn’t come alone. As you’re working through recovering data and repairing damaged hardware, you’ll need a structure to track the identification and resolution of these issues. The free issue tracking template gives you a space to describe the issue and what its impact is. Then you can set the priority, date it and assign a team member to own the issue and manage its resolution.

Lessons Learned Template

Because an IT disaster recovery plan is a living document, you want to revisit it and revise it with some regularity. That is often after testing has uncovered some issues you hadn’t thought of or in the aftermath of a real disaster. Either way, our free lessons learned template is a great tool to gather up what you’ve discovered. Be sure to bring your whole team into the proceedings. The more perspectives, the more insights.

How ProjectManager Can Help with an IT Disaster Recovery Plan

Templates are great, but they are limited. They’re just documents and lack the dynamism you need to plan your IT disaster recovery. ProjectManager is an award-winning project management tool that helps you to organize your plan and recovery.

Robust Security

Rather than respond to a problem, you’d prefer to avoid them. We have IT project management security features that restrict who can do what when they’re in the software. You can assign only who you want with administrative duties. Others can be onboarded, but only have defined privileges.

Timelines & Schedules

Building a plan requires organizing tasks over a timeline. It can get complicated. But we make scheduling your plan simple with an online Gantt chart that lists every task in your plan and sets the duration for each, so they can then populate a project timeline. If you have tasks that can’t start or end until another starts or ends, just link the task dependencies to avoid bottlenecks later on.

Live Tracking

Monitoring your plan as it’s executed to make sure that your IT is recovered and your systems are back on as quickly as possible, is how you keep on track. Our real-time dashboard monitors your recovery plan automatically and creates graphs and charts to keep you updated on task status, variance and much more.

ProjectManager is a cloud-based tool that helps you build plans to recover IT and monitor the process in real-time. Our features help you control every phase in your IT contingency plan. See why over 10,000 teams use our software to stay ahead of problems by taking this free 30-day trial.

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Information technology (IT) is no longer a tucked-away department with little impact on the success of a business. Organizations across industries need data storing, analysis and processing tools to manage every single aspect of their operations, so anything that affects their IT infrastructure carries some major risks. Read on to learn the importance of IT risk management.

What Is IT Risk Management?

IT risk management is a process that consists in identifying, assessing, prioritizing and managing IT risks. It’s a cross-functional effort that requires the coordination of multiple teams and is usually led by an IT risk manager.

Over the years, several IT risk management frameworks have been developed to help organizations with IT risk management. These IT risk management frameworks describe the guidelines, procedures and documentation that should be utilized to manage IT risks. In addition, IT risk management frameworks also set the standards that organizations should meet to comply with regulations such as international cybersecurity protocols.

What Is IT Risk?

The term IT risk refers to a variety of IT risks that can affect the IT environment of an organization, which is the infrastructure, hardware, software and networking that are utilized to run its IT operations.

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IT Risk Assessment Template

Use this free IT Risk Assessment Template for Excel to manage your projects better.

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Common IT Risks Examples

The way in which information technology is implemented varies from an organization to another, but in general terms, IT allows businesses to manage all the information that’s generated by their operations.

This information could be anything such as customer relationship management, market research, production planning or financial management data. Because of the importance of this data, a setback, limitation, risk, error or threat in IT can impact every facet of a business.

There are various internal and external threats that can affect the IT infrastructure of a business. Here are some examples of IT risks.

• Security Risks: There are external IT risks that are caused by criminal activity such as malware, phishing, viruses and other types of cybersecurity risks.
• Physical Threats: IT departments use servers, computers, networks and other physical resources to achieve their goals. Because they’re tangible elements, they are prone to natural disasters such as floods.
• Technical Failures: Technical failures are the malfunction of IT elements such as a software bug, code errors, hardware failures, among other things.
• Human Error: Users within the organization may make mistakes such as deleting data from a system unintentionally, failing to comply with cybersecurity policies or damaging hardware.

To mitigate negative outcomes, it’s worth investigating an IT project management software that can help you manage risks in IT and other projects. ProjectManager, for instance, let’s you plan IT projects with either a Gantt chart, kanban board, task list or sheet, and then you can track your risks with our built-in risk tracker and matrix. It’s ideal for tracking IT risks, so you can respond quickly. Try it free!

Then there’s the problem of finding the right people to address IT risk management, those with training and expertise in the space. These people, ideally led by an IT risk manager, will also need to have a good work ethic, so that they’re dependable and will commit to their responsibilities.

What Is an IT Risk Manager?

An IT risk manager is an IT professional who is very knowledgeable about risk management frameworks and is capable of identifying, assessing, and prioritizing IT risks. IT risk managers have the expertise to lead teams in executing risk management plans and developing risk mitigation strategies and policies to keep their organizations secure.

Top IT Risk Management Frameworks

As explained above, risk management frameworks help IT risk managers and teams know how to implement risk management practices to keep their IT operations safe. Here’s a quick overview of the most commonly used risk management frameworks there are.

NIST Risk Management Framework (RMF)

Developed by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), the NIST RMF is a risk management framework that focuses on cybersecurity and it’s usually implemented by larger organizations that have dedicated resources for IT risk management. This risk management framework consists of seven steps that summarize the process. To implement the NIST risk management framework it is important to be familiar with the NIST 800-53, a set of cybersecurity terms, measures and standards.

ISO 27001

The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) has developed the ISO 27001 risk management framework for those organizations that seek to obtain a global certification that allows them to demonstrate their capability to protect data such as intellectual property, financial information and any other sensitive information that’s shared by third parties such as customers, business partners or suppliers.

AICPA SOC 2

Created by the American Institute of CPAs (AICPA), the SOC 2 is a framework that helps organizations comply with cybersecurity standards for the processing of customer data. It consists of a series of steps that ensure that a business effectively complies with security, processing integrity, availability and confidentiality requirements.

OCTAVE FORTE

OCTAVE stands for Operationally Critical Threat, Asset, and Vulnerability Evaluation and is a risk management framework that helps organizations identify critical information technology assets, threats and the vulnerabilities that could expose them to IT risks.

IT Risk Management Process

IT risk management is the application of risk management methods to information technology to manage the risks inherent in that space. To do that means assessing the business risks associated with the use, ownership, operation and adoption of IT in an organization. Follow these steps to manage risk with confidence.

1. Identify the Risk

You can’t prepare for risk without first figuring out, to the best of your ability, where and when it might arise. To do so you should conduct IT audits periodically and in addition establish a risk management culture in your organization that motivates IT managers and team members to be alert to uncovering and recognizing any risks.

2. Analyze the Risk

Once you’ve identified risk, you then must analyze it and discern if it’s big, small or minimal in its impact. Also, what would be the impact of each of the risks? You’ll then add these findings to your IT risk assessment report.

3. Evaluate and Rank the Risk

Once you evaluate the impact of risks and prioritize them, you can begin to develop strategies to control them. This is done by understanding what how risks can affect your IT infrastructure, which is determining the likelihood of it occurring and the magnitude of its impact. Then you can say that the risk must be addressed or can be ignored without causing major disruption to your IT operations. Again, these rankings would be added to your risk assessment.

4. Create an IT Risk Assessment Report

An IT risk assessment report will help you analyze security threats and what impact they might have on your organization. This allows IT security teams and other stakeholders to understand the risks and, in so doing, plan investments to secure weakness in one’s security.

5. Create an IT Risk Management Plan

The IT risk management plan is used to identify, evaluate and plan for risks that might show up in your organization. Specifically, it will outline the actions you’ll take to mitigate those risks, including costs, tools and what approaches will be used to identify, assess, mitigate and monitor those activities.

6. Respond to the Risk

After all this, if the risk becomes an actual issue, then you’re no longer in the theoretical realm. It’s time for action. This is what’s called risk response planning in which you take your high-priority risks and decide how to treat them or modify them, so they place as a lower priority. Risk mitigation strategies apply here, as well as preventive and contingency plans. Add these approaches to your risk assessment.

7. Monitor & Review the Risk

Once you act, you must track and review the progress of mitigating the risk. Use your risk assessment to track and monitor how your team is dealing with the risk to make sure that nothing is left out or forgotten.

8. Establish an IT Risk Management Policy

An IT risk management policy is a comprehensive overview on the governance of an organization and its employees’ usage and interaction with data and technology. It will include risk identification, risk measurement and assessment, risk mitigation, risk reporting and monitoring.

IT Risk Management Strategies

Strategies are a way to provide a structured approach to identify, access and manage risks. They provide a process to regularly update and review the assessment based on changes.

Apply Safeguards

This is an avoidance strategy, where the company decides to avoid risk at all costs and focuses a lot of resources on that end. If you can avoid the risk, then it is no longer a threat to the IT infrastructure. However, there is a downside to this. If you avoid the risk, you also avoid the associated potential of its return and opportunity. So, it’s a decision not to take lightly.

Transfer the Risk

This is a transference strategy when the company transfers the risk to another entity. This redistribution can be onto the company members, some outsource entity or an insurance policy.

Reduce the Impact

This is a mitigation strategy, where the company works to reduce the impact of the risk through methodology, teams or whatever resources are at its disposal. It can involve small changes but always must come by process and a plan.

Related: 15 Free IT Project Management Templates for Excel & Word

Accept the Risk

This is an acceptable strategy, where you know there is risk and accepts that, so when and if it occurs you can deal with it then and there. This is sometimes unavoidable, but manageable if you follow the steps on your IT risk management plan.

Best Practices for IT Risk Management

Here are six best practices when managing risk in IT.

• Evaluate Early & Often: There’s no better time to start the risk management process than now, so begin early. Remember IT risk management is a process that should be planned, tracked and reported as a project. Then continue monitoring all the time. Risk never sleeps.
• Lead from the Top: Good leadership is many things. One aspect is developing a risk culture in the organization. That means valuing input from everyone, believing in the importance of acknowledging risk and keeping a positive attitude about responding.
• Communications: Having a clear channel to communicate risk throughout the organization is paramount to identifying and responding quickly and effectively to risk.
• Strong Policies: If there is not already a process and plan to deal with risk, you’re always going to be one step behind. This is again why a project risk assessment is key, but so is understanding roles and responsibilities for everyone on the project team, having a continuity plan, etc.
• Involve Stakeholders: A great resource that is often overlooked are the project stakeholders, who have a unique perspective and can provide insight into areas where risk might arise. So, involve them throughout the process, from asking for their participation with the risk assessment template and over the whole course of the project.
• Get Signoffs: At every stage of your risk management, get people to sign off on the strategy, which includes the stakeholders.

IT Risk Management Certifications

There are risk management certifications that can show employers that you’ve a strong knowledge of the topic. For example, RIMS-CRMP certification shows performance ability, technical knowledge and commitment to quality as a certified risk management professional. There is also Certified in Risk and Information Systems Control (CRISC), offered by the Information Systems Audit and Control Association (ISACA), and others.

How ProjectManager Helps with IT Risk Management

ProjectManager is a cloud-based project management software, which means that the data inputted is immediately updated, giving you the most accurate gauge to measure your project’s progress and catch any issues before they become risks.

Your risk assessment template can be uploaded into our online Gantt chart, where team members can receive assignments, comment and collect related documents, all of which can be attached to the risk.

Training Video on IT Risk Management Strategies

ProjectManager is a great tool, but it’s also a library of project management. We have tons of blog posts that speak to every aspect of the field and tutorial videos for a more visual approach.

Watch our resident expert Jennifer Bridges, PMP, as she explains IT management strategies and offers some best practices.

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So, if you need a tool that can help you with your IT risk management, then sign up for our software now at Projectmanager.

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Every project has requirements which mean every project manager should be prepared with a requirements management plan. How does this work? Let’s say your organization is building a new distribution center that’s reportedly going to bring hundreds of new jobs. It will include new employees, a new HR staff and new equipment.

But without insight from all sides—your customer support specialists, stakeholders, team members and customer base⁠—how will you know what the project requirements are to make that distribution center a success?

That’s why requirements management is an important facet to master as it’s imperative to the long-term success of a project.

What Are Requirements In Project Management?

In project management, requirements are a group of tasks or conditions that must be completed to finish the project successfully. They can include product features, quality, services or even processes. The purpose of these requirements is to ensure that resources and the company’s long-term goals are aligned at the end of the project.

Having those project management requirements on hand is essential to managing and executing projects. ProjectManager is software with unlimited file storage and real-time communication, acting as a central hub for all of your project requirements. Use our list view to quickly review all your project requirements, but any of our multiple project views can access the files anywhere and at any time. If files are updated, everyone is notified by email and in-app alerts so there’s only one source of truth. Get started with ProjectManager today for free.

Types of Project Requirements

In general, requirements can be categorized in three ways: business requirements, solution requirements and stakeholder requirements.

Business Requirements

Business requirements are the overall needs of the business for making the project happen. Requirements that fall into this category are more foundational, long-term needs that align with the long-term goals of the organization.

Solution Requirements

Solution requirements are more product-focused and drill down a little deeper. They can be functional or non-functional, and they ensure that the end result of the product satisfies both what the product needs to do and what the product should do.

Like our example above, solution requirements might include a functional requirement such as the implementation of the proper tools that the sales team needs to get their job done with the new CRM. A non-functional requirement would be if the CRM tool also included a content marketing calendar to assist the marketing team as well, but it isn’t necessarily a need.

Stakeholder Requirements

Stakeholder requirements describe your key personnel that signs off on milestones, produces the work, finalizes deliverables and more. They can be customers, team members, business partners or key leadership. It requires a tenacious project manager to make sure that the requirements of all stakeholders involved are well-balanced throughout the entirety of the project. It’s essential for good stakeholder management.

What Is Requirements Management?

Requirements management is the process of documenting, analyzing, tracing, prioritizing and validating project requirements. In simple terms, the project manager must gather requirements from all stakeholders to then create a requirements management plan. The requirements management plan will work as a guide that lists all project requirements and defines guidelines and procedures to meet them.

Then once the project starts, the project management team must make sure that the project activities and deliverables are aligned with the project requirements that were previously defined.

Requirements management is an ongoing activity in which the project manager must communicate with stakeholders to keep up with any changes made to the original requirements. Any changes to the project requirements should be properly controlled with a defined change management policy.

The Requirements Management Plan (RMP)

It’s important to have a requirements management plan—or RMP. This plan typically includes the following checklist:

• Stakeholder roles and responsibilities: Have these roles been identified? For each task, has there been an owner assigned to monitor risk and manage the day-to-day?
• Requirements management process: Have they been elicited, documented and understood across all departments and stakeholders?
• Define your requirement types: What are the functional and non-functional requirements?
• Map your requirement artifacts: This can include supplemental documents for stakeholder review.
• Prioritize requirements: Not every requirement is of equal importance. If one requirement has many dependencies, then it moves higher on the list to ensure it doesn’t hold up a number of other tasks. But if it’s a standalone need? Then it can be deprioritized.
• Make it traceable: By far one of the top components of good requirements management is traceability. Tracing your requirements gives stakeholders and team members insight into why the requirement exists, what changes have been made, and if the requirement is complete.
• Incorporate a numbering or versioning system: This is to help both stakeholders and team members get a gauge on how many revisions have occurred at each milestone and ensure that the latest one is always the one being worked on.
• Develop a communication plan: As we previously mentioned, it’s best to be as transparent as possible and document everything. This will help when it comes time to review where the project did the best and where hiccups were experienced. A communication plan can also encourage employee buy-in, as well as manage expectations for both stakeholders and team members.

The Requirements Management Process in 5 Steps

Listing out your requirements early can break down a wall of communication between the user and the developer, the stakeholder and the team member, and the company and the customer. Let’s discuss the process of gathering those requirements.

1. Requirements Elicitation

As with any well-mapped project, you’re going to start the planning process by interviewing and investigating the requirements and project needs of others. This could be a run-down of your entire stakeholder list, the customer support team, the sales associates and their needs or your customers. This process is called requirements elicitation and is the first step to gathering requirements for your project. Use our free requirements gathering template to get started.

2. Requirements Documentation and Understanding

Write down everything and document the product specifications so that other team members can have an understanding of the project scope from the outset. This part of the process is called requirements documentation and understanding. The more detailed you can get, the better.

3. Communicate Early and Often

Make your requirements documentation easy to translate across departments. Even if they never had a meeting with you, they should clearly understand the project requirements and scope from the get-go. Include updated notes from stakeholders and internal meetings as well so that every person involved feels as if they have project buy-in as they watch the updates unfold.

Understand Your Assumptions

If you understand your assumptions within your project, you can better balance the requirements within. Assumptions are typically wrapped around three things: time, budget and scope. Assumptions while managing your requirements can look like this:

• Forgetting to factor in holidays, PTO and sick leave
• Failing to consider whether or not tools are operational or in need of repair
• Assuming that stakeholders will provide feedback during milestones in a timely manner

4. Monitor and Track Requirements

Throughout the entirety of your project, make sure that you’re monitoring and tracking your requirements across all team levels, ensuring that risk stays low throughout each phase. You’ll also be able to use this data to ensure that the project is on track from a time, scope and budgetary standpoint, so you can report your findings to key stakeholders when it comes time to review milestones.

5. Managing Requirements During Project Execution

Requirements aren’t typically managed from one department in an organization; they’re managed from strategic planning to portfolio management, program management, project management and continuous improvement departments.

The benefits of managing your requirements over the course of the entire project are five-fold: it helps reduce costs, can improve project quality, helps decrease the time it takes to complete the project, decrease risks and can make your scope management plan effective.

How Do I Ensure Requirements Have Been Met?

It’s important that you review the project with stakeholders at each milestone and also at the very end. Do a post-mortem review where you go over your interview questions and your project closure checklist to gather final information. You can also throw in additional questions to get new information. This can include:

• Did you feel the project process went smoothly? Yes or no?
• What could have been improved during this project process?
• What did you learn from this project process?
• What do you recommend we include in projects in the future?

At the end of the project, it’s all about traceability. If you can look back at a requirement and see all the changes it went through and how it was completed, you and your team can gauge whether or not it was a genuine solution. You can also learn if it has any related non-functional requirements.

Understanding the outcome of the project and its requirements revolve around managing traceability throughout the project lifecycle so you can thoroughly review it thereafter.

ProjectManager Helps with Requirements Management

The key to any great project is to minimize surprises. With requirements management, the goal is just that: to create an environment where communication is the name of the game, and everyone is on the same page, so surprises are limited. ProjectManager has tools that make that not only possible but simple.

With our cloud-based Gantt charts, you and your team can see the entire project plan from one view, including all of its dependencies. Need to edit a requirement? Our Gantt charts are easy to edit and can accommodate any changes, making them traceable.

ProjectManager is great for teams looking to communicate with more transparency across the board. With multiple views like Gantt charts, kanban boards and task lists, you can collaborate easily by featuring comments from key stakeholders or team members. Plus, when one team member updates a task, notifications are sent to the right people at the right time.

Managing requirements across multiple teams is no easy feat. Confirm that all involved in your project are on the same page, no matter what. ProjectManager is an award-winning software committed to helping teams collaborate effectively across multiple platforms. Sign up for our free 30-day trial today.

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