What Are Technical Requirements in Project Management?
What Are Technical Requirements in Project Management?
Digital project management leverages software solutions to automate processes and streamline workflows. If there’s any downside, it’s that you’re relying on technology. At times, technical issues can occur and threaten to throw your productivity off course.
That’s why implementing technical requirements is of paramount importance to effective project management in the digital age. With the right technical requirements in place, everything should run smoothly and you can leverage the technology to work for you rather than against you.
In this guide, we’ll explore what exactly technical requirements are, why you need them in project management, and the various types you need to consider.
What are technical requirements?
Technical requirements are the technical issues that must be considered to successfully complete a project. These can include aspects such as performance, reliability, and availability.
In software projects, technical requirements typically refer to how the software is built, for example:
- The programming language
- The operating system (OS)
- The standards
Knowing and understanding project management software requirements will better equip you to make informed decisions regarding budget, resource allocation, and general project planning.
It’s also critical to communicate these technical project management requirements in no uncertain teams, so everyone from the software development team to project stakeholders or clients can see at a glance what they should expect when interacting with the software.
Why are technical requirements important in project management?
As a project manager, the onus is on you to not only plan out projects but come up with contingencies to safeguard against everything from changing scope to technical issues. Setting up IT project management requirements is part of an initial effort to ensure there are no technical hitches along the way.
This is especially true when developing software products, when each feature must be fit for the rigors of user testing. There are a wide range of technical requirements and the omission of any one of them on a particular project can lead to disastrous results.
By considering all the technical requirements that may apply to your project upfront, you give yourself the best chance of successfully completing it to stakeholder, client, or end user expectations.
Important types of technical requirements
An in-depth understanding of various types of technical requirements is necessary if you’re developing software or relying heavily on technology for projects.
There are 10 main requirements, and we’ll cover a range of technical requirements examples in detail so you can take on your next project with confidence.
Availability
Availability refers to the amount of time your team or the end user of your product has to use the software. Expressed as a percentage, this metric gives you a clear idea of the software or service’s uptime, which is to say how long it is online and usable for on any given day.
This metric will never be at 100% due to essential maintenance and the probability of unexpected bugs or errors but should be as close to 100% as possible.
With this metric, you can plan out team productivity and understand when there may be blips due to service downtime. For example, if there’s regular planned maintenance for one hour every Friday afternoon, you can adapt your work schedule to accommodate this.
Reliability
Reliability as a technical requirement refers to the average amount of time between outages and technical issues. The longer the time period, the more reliable the software or service.
Otherwise known as mean time between failures (MTBF), this IT metric will give you an indication of how often you can expect the software to be live before you might run into some issues.
Much like availability, this metric can inform your approach to project planning and, if you’re developing software, allow you to estimate the times when you’ll need to dedicate more resources to troubleshooting than usual.
Data quality
The data that you gather — most likely from your customers — helps you make customer-centric decisions that lead to more impactful results.
It’s important to make sure you gather high-quality data. Otherwise, you could fall prey to migration issues or data corruption. Low-quality data has the power to jeopardize your project planning and set you back substantially.
Information security
To avoid issues when moving data around, information security is critical.
If you want to ensure your project plans are secure, along with any customer information you’ve gathered for them, you need robust security measures. Factors such as encryption allow you to safely migrate data and keep sensitive information private.
Performance
Performance largely refers to load times.
If a web page takes more than two seconds to load in a web browser, then the end user or team member experience is weakened. Address performance issues to boost productivity and customer satisfaction.
Serviceability
Serviceability is all about how effectively you can make changes, updates, or upgrades to your service or software without interrupting usage. When you can make improvements without drastically affecting the user experience, you can reduce the MTBF and streamline the overall experience.
Maintainability
Maintainability refers to how quickly you can resolve technical issues. Measured by the metric mean time to repair (MTTP), an optimal maintainability rate is less than an hour for the most severe issues.
Accessibility
Accessibility is an essential technical requirement, as it makes sure information is available to everyone. For example, closed captioning (CC) for videos allows team members or users to digest multimedia content even if they’re hard of hearing.
Human error
Your software or service should be able to detect when users have made an error, and inform them. We’re all prone to typos and mistakes, so at times users will need to be made aware of a mistake they’ve made so they can correct it and move on.
Since human error is inevitable to some degree, it’s important to accommodate it during product development.
System error
System errors indicate an issue in the backend. In these cases, you want the user to be directed to technical support so they can continue using the software as soon as possible.
Manage your technical requirements during project management with Wrike
When developing software, you need to account for all the applicable technical requirements to satisfy stakeholder and client expectations. Without a thorough consideration of technical aspects, there’s a higher degree of risk for the end user experience and overall customer satisfaction.
Once you’ve mapped out the technical requirements, it’s a good idea to draw up a software requirements document (SRD), which you can then present to interested parties for full transparency.
With Wrike, you can store and share your SRD for a project and make the most of the 360-degree visibility to ensure everyone is clear on the technical requirements involved. Alternatively, you can set up a knowledge base and manage user permissions so only those that need to access the information can.
You can also set up recurring tasks to remind software engineers to check for errors according to the metrics as outlined in your SRD, such as MTTP and MTBF.
When you use Wrike, everything you do can be clearly laid out in a shared team calendar, too. That way, everyone on the software development team can see at a glance what their responsibilities are and how often to complete certain tasks.
Further reading:
Artem Gurnov
Artem is a Director of Account Development at Wrike. He previously held the role of Project Manager, overseeing a team of customer success managers (CSMs). Over the years of building teams and scaling business processes, he has successfully deployed multiple projects, from automating client outreach to setting up work prioritization tools for sales reps and CSMs.