5 IT Infrastructure Lessons Learned from Missed Requirements

Dr. Andrew Makar is an IT program manager and is the author of the Microsoft Project Made Easy series. For more project management advice, visit the website TacticalProjectManagement.com.

  Applications Delivery   Information Technology   Lessons Learned   Quality   Requirements Management  

In a typical software development project, gathering and managing requirements is a common process. IT needs business requirements to implement the system as IT doesn’t exist to simply support IT. However, what about IT infrastructure projects? Do infrastructure projects have specific requirements beyond the architecture diagram?

Below are five lessons learned from an infrastructure project that struggled with missed requirements. The project example is based on an infrastructure technology project where the team was tasked with replacing an outdated IT infrastructure with a new set of company standards.

Lesson Learned #1: Ensure subject matter experts are dedicated to the project. Gathering requirements, even in infrastructure projects, starts with the subject matter experts who know the business process or the underlying technology. In this example, the subject matter expert was overloaded with other work and was unable to participate in all of the project’s requirement-gathering sessions. The key subject matter expert provided junior resources that didn’t understand all the technology or specific requirements. As a result, several key requirements were missed and the architecture had to be modified several times. If the key subject matter expert participated entirely in the requirement sessions, the project team would have had a better set of …

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