AT THE EARLY STAGE OF DEFINING A PROJECT, do your project managers have a role that links your project management process to your process for building business requirements?

Enhance Project Oversight through Business Requirements Extraction Processes

There is a tendency to execute on the business case, business requirements and project management as three separate processes with limited interaction.  Even worse is a tendency to try using the governance framework developed for one area to control the processes in other areas.  The better approach is to use one of the following starting points:

for business case development (value management), an approach that is designed to help the organization harvest benefit for project management, an approach that is designed to measure goal and task compliance for requirements, an approach that is designed for the purpose of eliciting information from the organization

From the correct starting point, we define the interactions needed to tie requirements extraction into the other areas of competency. For example, would projects be easier to manage at your organization if:

A single event took place before the project started which crystallized the general scope of the initiative. Priorities and objectives were defined clearly enough to be used to estimate the next stages of systems development.

There was a detailed elicitation plan and timeline produced which was signed off by the sponsors.

Issues or gaps in the requirements definition were readily isolated for the project manager.

The project manager had a completeness test that could be objectively applied on larger initiatives to determine if scope was missed in the documentation.