PMP Protein: Requirements Management and Requirements Traceability Matrix

 By Poornima Nagaraja, PMP

Mediocre requirement management processes are major causes for project failures. Continuous research studies constantly mention this aspect of management. Unfortunately, it continues till date. 

Many organizations believe (and rightly so) that utilizing the right set of project management processes would lead to high probability for project success. Hence, if you are working as a management professional and/or practitioner in any organization, you need to understand Requirement Management Processes and its advantages.

One of the fundamental aspects of requirement management is this: 

Do what is required and deliver based on available time, money and resources. Over committing has been known to be one of the biggest reasons for project failures.

What is a Requirement?

The Project Management Institute (PMI®) defines requirements as follows: 

A condition or capability to be present in a product, service or result to satisfy an agreement or other formally imposed specification.

Requirements are needs and expectations of project stakeholders. Requirements are usually in the language of customers. Requirement gathering starts from the early phase of pre-project work, where needs assessment happens. 

If a Business Analyst (BA) is available for the project, then all requirement related activities will be part of that role. Project Managers should be collaborating with the BA to manage requirements.

Before further going into details of Requirement Management, let’s understand the difference between Scope and Requirements. 

Requirements can be vast, because when you consider all possible items as per customer expectations, the coverage becomes large. However, the scope of the project, program sets the boundary conditions. The scope will have: 

• The elaboration of project scope.
• The deliverables to be given to the customer.
• What is included in the project.
• What is excluded in the project within available time, budget and resources, which is tacitly explained by the “inclusion” part.

While managing scope, the Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) plays a key role because when the scope of the project is broken down, you get a WBS. A WBS is applicable irrespective of project life cycle being used. In some life cycles, the term WBS may not be used, but effectively you get it when you break down the scope of the project. For example, in Agile, you take the epics and break it down to user stories.

Now, let’s understand requirements management.

Requirements Management

Requirements Management is a repetitive set of activities that includes determining, documenting, and managing stakeholder needs and expectations during project lifecycle to meet project objectives. Do read this line again. It’s repetitive as it’s both iterative and integrative in nature.

Requirements management also includes tasks, which will establish a requirements baseline and maintain the traceability of requirements, which we will see shortly. In Adaptive/Agile life cycles, requirements are consistently managed with Backlog Refinement. Dedicated time is allocated for such activities. 

Requirements management is very crucial to consistently engage with stakeholders and understand their needs and requirements. This ensures the project manager and the team to prioritize requirements appropriately and implement the deliverables in a right way which leads to Customer Satisfaction. 

After all, a project is declared successful only when our customers are satisfied. Meeting the requirements of the customer helps achieve customer satisfaction. 

Now, requirements are usually managed with the Requirements Management Plan. This plan is the output of a planning process, i.e., Plan Scope Management. This plan tells how project and product requirements will be analyzed, documented and managed. Some organizations may call it the Business Analysis Plan. If a BA is available, it’s his/her responsibility to maintain the Requirements Management Plan.

Contents of Requirements Management Plan

One can think of the following contents for the Requirements Management Plan:

• How requirement activities will be managed.
• How configuration management activities for requirements will be done.
• How requirements will be prioritized.
• What metrics will be used.
• What will be the traceability structure/matrix.

In the previous line, I introduced a term called (requirements) traceability matrix. Let’s understand it. 

Requirements Traceability Matrix (RTM)

The Requirements Traceability Matrix is one of the outputs of Collect Requirements process – other being the Requirements Documentation. Requirements documentation lists out all the requirements for your project. In your organization, you may have different names for Requirements Documentation, such as Product Requirements Documentation (PRD), Product Requirements Specification (PRS) or any other name.   

Coming to the RTM, PMI defines is as follows:

Requirements Traceability Matrix (RTM) is a grid that links product requirements from their origin to the deliverables that satisfy them. 

The RTM creates a clear way to track requirements throughout the project life cycle. It thus ensures the requirements approved in requirements documentation are delivered at the end of the project.

As per PMI, the RTM components can be:

• Business needs and objectives
• Project objectives
• Project scope and WBS deliverables
• Product design
• Product development
• Test strategy and test Scenarios 
• High-level requirements to more detailed requirements

A sample of RTM is shown in the below figure. It’s taken from PMI’s Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK®) guide, 6th edition. 

As shown, the RTM is a grid/matrix like structure. There are attributes such as Unique ID, Requirement Description, WBS deliverables, Test cases among others. One can have other attributes such as Owner, Requirement Priority, Versioning etc.

With this, I believe you got an introductory understanding to:

• Requirements Management
• Requirement Management Plan
• Requirements Documentation
• Requirements Traceability Matrix 

Brief Profile:
Poornima Nagaraja, PMP. I’ve over fourteen years of experience and currently working as a Quality Assurance (QA) Manager at Infor.

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• PMP Protein: Changing Work Cultures and Organizational Impact

PMP Protein: Changing Work Cultures and Organizational Impact

By K Suresh, PMP

In this article, we will see how changing work culture can hurt an organization’s productivity, profits and sustainable growth. 

With a new set of workers, an organization also brings new cultural aspects, which will impact the organizational culture. 

While I have had experiences in power and construction industry, these challenges are also being felt in other industries as well. 


Changing Work Culture
Let me outline some areas and inform how the organizational culture is impacted by a variety of causes related to new generation of workers. 

Cause #1: Lack of awareness of work place ethics among the Gen – Y and the Millennials (the fourth-generation employees) 
Since childhood, the younger generations – predominantly Gen-Y and the millennials - were brought up with:

• High comfort levels,
• Marks oriented education without proper maturity on human values,
• Lack of beliefs,
• Lack of respect for an individual,
• Poor understanding of work place ethics,
• No ground rules, and 
• Inability to face practical challenges in versatile environments. 

With these, teams formed by the fourth-generation employees are becoming prey to their own shortfalls in work places. On the other hand, organizations are facing challenges in rendering basic intensive training to re-orient the teams and increase work engagement.

Cause # 2: High Diplomacy by Top Management
The executives in top management are concentrating less on the understanding levels of junior executives by maintaining high diplomacy. Because the senior executives have the positive assumptions that junior executives are aware of work place ethics, have good behavior and attitude, and go with analytical planning approaches related to work execution. In core industries, other than software industry, more physical efforts to be exerted with patience at junior working levels. This needs to improved. However, I do agree that the new generation of workers are having good soft skills. 

I would like to mention this diplomacy is costing billions of dollars in losses to the organizations and it’s losing sustainability goals of the organization in the global markets. 

While optimum diplomacy is mandatory to empower teams, a high diplomatic approach based on flawed assumptions will not produce the needed results.

Cause # 3: Generation Gaps 
If we can classify the graduates into by grouping them in decades, the below ones will be the comparison of capabilities for majorities of active employees. Do note that it’s a rough estimate. 

• Decade of 1980-1990: IQ > 50%, EQ < 50%
• Decade of 1990-2000: IQ = 50%, EQ = 50% 
• Decade of 2000-2010: IQ < 50%. EQ > 50%
  (IQ – Intelligence Quotient, EQ – Emotional Quotient)

This shows a downward trend for the attitudes and behaviors of the team members, which is also compounded by the effect of degrading quality of academic educational standards.  

Cause # 4: Reduced Physical Working Capacity
The changing food habits and the degraded food quality due to mechanized foods - instead of natural products - are the inhibiting factors for the decreased physical capacities. Reduced physical work capability can’t be compensated by good soft skills. 

This leads to stress in team members while executing their works. It becomes worse when team members are asked to work in environments that require a great deal of physical movements. 

Cause # 5: Employee Expectations 
The younger generations, such as the late Gen-Y and the millennials, are smart working in nature. But smart work is no replacement for hard work. Both have to be together. 

The new generation of workers are sharp in grasping basic fundamentals, but feel saturated that they have learnt the maximum if they cover the basics! And nothing innovative needed to done further. Also, in few years they start looking for managerial roles instead of being engaged in their roles and responsibilities, for which they have been recruited.

Cause # 6: Capabilities for Construction Industry
Working conditions in construction industries are obviously tough due to many factors such as:

• Versatile climates, 
• Working cultures, 
• Handling large teams, 
• Long working hours.

Hence leaders with high emotional intelligences (or EI) are required to achieve the results and meet the milestones. In other words, high working capacities and capabilities are desired to achieve successful project results. But the capacity to work hard and capability to perform is lacking in the fourth generation of workers.

Impact - Employer Challenges 
All the above causes are leading to various limitations, which in turn leave the founders, and investors of the organization at stake with unsustainable business in global markets. Big corporate organizations, which are operating with diversified portfolios are also in the danger of extinction.

My guess is that if the trend continues, then these organizations will cease to exist in next 10 to 15 Years.

Scope for Improvement
Though there are many problems with the changing work cultures, there are also scope for improvements, some of which I’ve noted below.

Improvement #1: Basic grooming of children by parents
Positive grooming of children is necessary with respect to behavior, awareness of critical situations and challenges to face in personal and professional lives. They should be taught the value of patience, value of critical thinking and increased ability in analysis, etc. We as parents should not be limiting children to high comforts and more CGPA in academics.

Improvement #2: Educational institutions to improve students on behavioral aspects 
In India, we can implement the South Korean concept of minimum 1 to 2 years of work in the defense sector or in short service commission. This will be an eligibility criteria for organizational (human resource) recruitment. This will also improve employee behavior.

Improvement #3: Following global standards 
There can be stringent process approach implementation in organizations by maintaining global standards leading to evolutionary reformation. This can maintain sustainable business in the long-term.

Improvement #4: Change in organizational orientation
To remain in the longer term and be effective, organizations need to build leaders who aspire to achieve excellence in business instead of business excellence models for branding. While brand is important, more important is to actually achieve business excellence. 

Improvement #5: Corporate governance
Organizations need to take period surveys to have a complete depiction of working cultures and improvements by employing effective leaders within the functional and administrative levels. Effective implementation can be started off by Periodic Dip Stick Surveys.

As I work in Indian industries, I ask these two questions (only from an organization perspective) to my colleagues and fellow professionals. I find these questions yet to be properly answered.

Question – 1: If the organization is being driven in a misleading direction, who will take an initiative to re-orient and how it will be done?

Question – 2: If the human resource (HR) department takes short-cuts while recruiting, who will be responsible for the reduced standard in working cultures?

I welcome your suggestions and ideas on these two questions. 

Conclusion
Organizational have changed from people driven approaches to process driven approaches and finally are stepping into the principle driven approaches for sustainability in global markets.

Every Individual will have flashes of brilliance and ideas, but taking a lead in re-aligning the mismatches in actual facts and combining the same with actual implementation is important. Because organizations are now becoming outcome oriented on a vector scale to survive in high competition of the global market.

Brief Profile
K.Suresh
Manager – Projects, Adani Raipur Energen Ltd (formerly GMR Chhattisgarh Energy Ltd). I can be reached at: suresh.kotta1978@gmail.com.


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PMP Protein: Understanding Brainstorming

By Vivek Vardhan, PMP

In the earlier article, I wrote about Leadership and Team Building. 

Another, leadership toolkit is brainstorming, which is quick, effective and generates a lot of ideas. In this article, we will see what is brainstorming, in which processes it is used and the possible types that can be used by a project manager. 

Overall, brainstorming work as a technique, which is typically used to generate ideas. As per Project Management Institute (PMI)’s, brainstorming is defined as: 

“A technique that is performed in a group setting and led by a facilitator to engage stakeholders to quickly identify a list of ideas for a specific topic in a relatively short time period.”

PMI also says brainstorming can be used to identify a list of risks or a set of stakeholders or solutions in the PMBOK guide. The main principle of successful brainstorming is that the quality of ideas flowing shall not be assessed at the initial stage. 

Usage of Brainstorming
Brainstorming is one of the tools and techniques which has been used throughout the PMBOK Guide. Let’s check them one by one. 

• Scope Management: For a successful project outcome, it is important to have proper scope defined. A good defined scope depends on collection of creative and relevant ideas. Hence, the important usage of brainstorming happens in Scope Management – specifically in Collect Requirements process. In this process, you can use brainstorming to generate and collect multiple ideas related to both project and product requirements.
• Quality Management: In quality management, you can use brainstorming to develop the Quality Management Plan in Plan Quality Management process. With brainstorming, you can engage with the team members and or subject matter experts to get the best of inputs.
• Risk Management: In my view, the most comprehensive use of brainstorming one can use is risk management, while identifying risks. In the process of Identify Risks, you can use it to get both the individual project risks and overall project risk. This process results in the creation of the Risk Register document.
• Stakeholder Management: Another practical usage of brainstorming is to identify all possible stakeholders in Identify Stakeholders process.  This process results in the creation of the Stakeholder Register document.

Brainstorming can also be used in Integration Management while developing the Project Charter and Project Management Plan.

Things to Take Care 
While brainstorming, you as the project manager, may have to play the role of facilitator. Hence, you need to keep a tab of certain important things while performing this activity.

Since quantity takes dominance over quality, rejection of one idea may lead to failure of the session. Hence, in order to keep the people motivated for sharing, conducive atmosphere be made so that the participants do not shy away or feel ignored. There are no rules for a new thought, let the thoughts flow in, we may find it funny or stupid, but never mind, it can be sorted out later. The success of brainstorming depends on how well the subject of discussion is identified and related problem areas clearly spelt out within the group. Lack of clarity on the topic would lead to unnecessary discussion and waste of energies. 

Types of Brainstorming
To understand brainstorming as subject, following discussion techniques are used to generate creative ideas. Basically, these are various types of brainstorming. 

1. Star Bursting: It focuses on writing set of questions rather than answers, which ensures that all aspects of the project are addressed before any work begins. It is useful in the situation when the project team is rushing to get things done at the last minute. Eventually at the end, good question database helps to get instant answers, which leads to good content in a short time. However, this brainstorming technique is being used mostly to build Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) section.  
2. Brain Writing: This is a very basic technique and is based on general principle of separate ideas generated from decision. Here you allow the individual participants time to consider the question(s) individually before the group creativity session is held.
3. Figuring Storming: This technique is based on analysis of how someone else might handle the situation. Putting yourself in new shoes can give the team a different perspective, helping them to see the possibilities from fresh ideas. This technique works best in a situation where the team finds itself coming across the same ideas for repetitive projects.
4. Online Brainstorming: This form of brainstorming is a useful technique when the project team is working virtually in isolation. To collect the ideas, an online central repository is created where virtual team members can contribute and work in collaboration. 
5. Rapid Ideation: It’s a useful technique when the project team has a shortage of time. In this technique, Project Manager or team leader provides context, information and questions on the topic along with pre-set timelines to individuals to write down ideas around the topics without considering filtering their ideas. 
6. Round Robin: Brainstorming technique under which project team forms a circle to kick off discussions. Topic of discussion is shared by Project Manager, afterwards turn by turn each team member participates and share his idea. The shared ideas are recorded by a facilitator. In this technique, it is important not to evaluate ideas until everyone gets the opportunity to share. 

To conclude, brainstorming a method of generating ideas to solve problems by involving group of people under the direction of facilitator. 

Written by Vivek Vardhan:

Vivek Vardhan is a Supply Chain Management Professional and has project management exposure of five years. He has overall 21 years of work experience.

References:

[1] Book: Organizational Behavior by Stephen P. Robbins

[2] Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK) Guide, 6th Edition, by Project Management Institute (PMI)

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PMP Protein: Leadership and Team Building

By Vivek Vardhan, PMP

Leadership helps project manager or leaders to influence a group toward the achievement of a vision or set of project goals. It further helps to establish direction by developing a vision of the future goals and targets, align team with project vision through communication and inspire individuals to overcome hurdles. A good leader provides vision and strategy for project and to society. 

As said by a philosopher: 
“It’s not necessary that leaders are formally made; they may arise out of the positions or by virtue of their authority and tasks.”

Further to elaborate, leadership can arise out of one’s personality and traits. Such people are born leaders and take the task of leading groups in whatever they do. Leadership comes naturally to such people. For example, India has umpteen examples of such leaders in various areas like organizational, political, social and religious aspects of life. 


Basic Traits of a Leader

The basic traits of leaders are enumerated below:

• Ambition and Energy: These characteristics are part of extraversion. This is more indicative of leader emergence. However, people who are too assertive in nature are found to be less effective.
• Conscientiousness and openness: Individuals who are disciplined and keep their commitments, are creative and flexible, appear to be in a better place with respect to leadership attributes.
• Agreeableness: This characteristic represents a person who is described as good-natured, co-operative and trusting.
• Empathy: This leadership characteristic is part of emotional intelligence (EI), makes an important component for effective leadership. Leaders who understand and listen to their followers are more followed by others.

Leadership Styles

Leaders apply various leadership style in their work. In order to describe leadership styles, different scholars have cited different leadership styles based on project’s requirements, goals and objectives. One old school of thought propagates for employee-oriented leadership where leader emphasizes on interpersonal relations with employees and production-oriented leader wherein leader emphasizes technical or task aspects of the job.

The common leadership styles are as below:

• Visionary and Authoritative: Using this style, project managers able to divert people toward project vision. This is very effective once project scope is defined and signed off.  
• Coaching: Coaching is used to develop people for the project deliverables. It helps to understand individual’s capabilities and divert it towards project delivery. It is a project manager’s responsibility to understand his team capabilities and utilize it for project delivery. 
• Affiliative: Creation of emotional bonding with-in team is important for project success. It also helps to motivate team to deal with stressful work environment without impacting deliverables and their strength. 
• Democratic: Participation from individual has importance, it is project manager responsibility to build consensus through participation and get maximum output based on individual capability, skill and strength.
• Pacesetting: Attain appropriate and desired outcome from competent team plays a vital role in project success. To achieve this, team individual has to be self-direction, so that by monitoring and shaping their decisions, able to deliver projected results with-in set timelines.
• Commanding/ Coercive: In times, project face crisis or even before reaching to a crisis, it is important to identify critical issues, non-performing individuals, source of negativity and take corrective measures. In this situation coercive leadership style helps to deal with the problem. This style should be applied occasionally depending on situation, otherwise it would lead to negative impact on overall team performance and affect the work environment in a reverse way. 

The Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK®) guide from Project Management Institute (PMI®) has a set of different leadership styles elaborated in its latest edition. In addition to the above styles, you can also those leadership styles such as transactional leadership, servant leadership, charismatic leadership among many others.

Qualities of a Leader
Leadership qualities required for a successful project management and its execution can be understood with the help of following cyclical diagram, which signifies that it is a continuous process and does not end with a task.

The above figure enumerates what is required of a leader on a continuous basis. A leader should be capable of guiding the team in the right direction and influence their behavior to optimally utilize skills and capabilities using relational power. Leader should be able to develop ideas and innovate on strategies to lead the team towards building focus on deliverables. An atmosphere conducive for building of trust be created where the people are inspired to perform and challenge the status quo to scale various organizational aspirations.  Ability of a leader to inspire others to act beyond their self-interest plays a crucial role in determining the success path. All this can be achieved by having a focus on long-range mission and vision by the leader. 

Communication is the crux of all success and failures, if a thought is not communicated in a proper way, it may lead to interpretations and misinterpretations widely affecting the rise and fall of leaders and their leadership skills.

Leadership is the skill which affects a project’s success if not used properly. Strong, ethical leadership is extremely critical for success of a project. Although there are several different leadership styles, only some of the most effective leaders are able to tailor their management practice to suit project requirements.  

One of the key jobs of a leader is to build a successful team. As the project manager, you are the leader of the project. In fact, Project Management Institute (PMI®) defines the project manager as:

“The project manager is the person assigned by the performing organization to lead the team that is responsible for achieving the project objectives.”

Hence, in the concluding part of this piece, let’s see how as the project manager and leader of your project, you can do team building and how in turn it helps your team. 

Team Building
Team building is an important trait of project success. Team Building plays a vital role in successful project delivery by building competent and effective team. It enables and encourages members of a team to work well together. 

However, team building represents action or process, which helps to bring group of people to work together effectivally as a team in order to achieve pre-defined goals, for example, by having them to take part in different activities or games. 

Team building at work place enables better communication; better relationships and ultimately increases team productivity. 

Successful Project managers are best leaders to influence others with their ideas. A good leader deploys their innate qualities to inspire a workforce or a team to achieve goals. 

Team building helps project managers to form efficient team by developing following qualities:

• Responsive and meaningful Communication: Communication is two-way street, discussion based team building activities enables open communication amongst team individuals. Responsive and meaningful communication helps team individuals to understand each other and improve relationship and in turn, improves quality of work done by team. 
• Motivate Team Individual: Motivated team is the key of success for a project. A motivated team works together effectively, problems get flattened out easily and achievements begin to flow apparently. The team who can work together are more efficient and passionate about success. Team building and team development activities helps developing motivated team at work.
• Creativity: Taking the team outside of routine helps exposing them to new experience, which will force them to think out of the box. Working together with other team members can ignite creativity and fresh ideas, which will help them to think and generate creative ideas.      
• Enhance Productivity: By improving existing ways of working, elimination of obstacles helps to enhance productivity of team. Productivity at work place only be guaranteed if team individuals have ability to work together. Team building activities helps to bring individuals together under one roof.  
• Develop a Collaborative work culture: Collaborative work culture is help to lay foundation of fruitful project outcome. Team building activities helps to create collaborative work place and improve team dynamics so that decision-making process is streamlined and problem solving become simpler. 
• Develop Problem Solving Skills: Team building activities that requires co-workers to work together and solve critical problems can improve the ability to think rationally and strategically. If team is able to determine the situation when the problem arises and provide the solution, it can then effectively take charge when a real crisis occurs. 
• Break the barrier: Team building exercises give leadership the opportunity to meet team individuals as colleague rather than as boss, which helps to boost the employee morale and increase trust factor. 
• Interpersonal relations: Team building exercises create strong bond between team individuals; it helps to bring them close to each other which eventually gets converted into a strong interpersonal relationship.

Human beings comprise the most important and critical resource of an organization. It is this resource around which all domains of any organization function. Hence, it is very crucial to ensure synergies and co-ordination within the teams and work force so that all other relevant factors automatically fall in place and desired results are obtained.

Written by Vivek Vardhan:
Vivek Vardhan is a Supply Chain Management Professional and has project management exposure of five years. He has overall 21 years of work experience.

References:
[1] Book: Organizational Behavior by Stephen P. Robbins
[2] Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK) Guide, 6th Edition, by Project Management Institute (PMI)

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