Eliciting and Documenting Vendor Requirements

Eliciting and Documenting Vendor Requirements

The quality of work performed by a vendor can only be as good as the requirements you provide them. Whether they are a contracting officer, project manager, or member of the integrated project team, an individual who works with a contractor should be adept at eliciting requirements from stakeholders. Taking those requirements and communicating them to vendors in a clear, measurable, and concise fashion will have a direct impact on project success.

In this course, participants will recognize the difference between a requirement and specification and better appreciate how different stakeholders require a different level of detail when it comes to communicating a requirement. Participants also learn how to define the problem, vision, and scope of a solution that will become the primary output of a project. This solution scope becomes the foundation for all future requirements that are documented and communicated to vendors. The solution scope will also become the baseline of against which participants will measure the project to detect and defend against scope creep.

As part of the requirements analysis process, participants also learn how to develop a requirements work plan, which will guide the requirements elicitation activities they will need to perform. Participants learn how to use models to analyze requirements and communicate the requirements to vendors and validate the requirements with stakeholders. Finally, participants learn how to package all of the requirements into a requirements document that can be delivered to vendors and maintained throughout the life cycle of the project.