In this chapter, we continued the process started in Chapter 5 by honing our project definition and by creating the project structure and framework. You should now have clearly defined project objectives, which are used as the project s major deliverables or are used to define the major deliverables. We spent quite a bit of time identifying and categorizing stakeholders. This often-skipped step is vital to a successful project because making sure the project meets the needs of users and the expectations of stakeholders is vitally important. Although the task of identifying all stakeholders can be a bit larger than you might at first have imagined, when you re finished, you ll know that you ve likely included all the right people in the right ways.

With a complete list of project stakeholders, you can develop the project s requirements. To develop requirements before identifying all the relevant project stakeholders would simply mean you d have to cycle through this process two or three (or more) times to refine requirements as you discovered or included new stakeholders or risk the project will not meet all perceived requirements. With a complete and categorized list of stakeholders, you can more easily manage the requirements gathering phase. Depending on the nature of the IT project, your project requirements will vary. You will also have to find a way to integrate or manage sometimes disparate requirements. Sometimes that means you have to negotiate with various stakeholders or work with them to agree on what might be removed or...