Question: What are requirements? What is the difference between requirements,
needs, and wants?
Response:
Requirement: A requirement is a condition or capability
needed by a stakeholder to solve a problem or achieve an objective.
In other words, requirements indicate the characteristic of
the process that are essential for meeting the goals of the business.
Needs: Needs are the capabilities a stakeholder deem
necessary to achieve objectives, and approved by the sponsors.
Requirements are subset of needs.
Wants: Wants are important but not essential to achieving
the business goals or resolving the business challenges. Wants are based on the
actual day to day experiences of the people. However, they represent an ideal
stake of how people would like things to be in the business. During SDLC some
wants may become requirements and vice verse.
For example: Let’s consider a company trying to venture in
the insurance market.
The new company needs new business, underwriting, and policy
administration, but has budget for only new business system.
In this scenario, apart from the new business system the
company has to have underwriting, and policy administration system to run its
operations, but so far because of constraints sponsors were able to establish
only the new business process and solution. Therefore, new business, underwriting,
and policy administration are the needs of the new insurance company but the new
business system is the current requirement.
In case the sponsors thinks that a capability for the customer to
do changes to the policy online will be better instead of calling the company, but they are
constrained. In this scenario online system is a want and capability of calling
the company is a need, and a requirement for the IT department.
