The role of requirements management in the design of built environments: a case study

Abstract

Due to the known difficulties on managing the design process of built environments, researchers and entrepreneurs have continuously developed and implemented best practices from areas such as Project Management (PM). However, there are still gaps to be filled, such as difficulties on monitoring the stakeholder’s requirements and their dynamics. In attempt to eliminate this gap, this paper aims to analyze if requirements management (RM) can be integrated to PM and which are the main advantages and disadvantages of this integration. The research includes a literature review which presents PM and RM concepts, the last one based on software engineering approach. Moreover, a case study was performed in a construction company, using semi-structured interviews. The research showed that the use of RM is advantageous, even not solving all the projects difficulties, and that the proper structuring of the projects is a condition for the success of RM implementation. The main contribution is a generic and systematic proposal for integrating the stages of the RM to the projects.