I am a Project Manager assigned with the project of a services migration project moving managed website hosting services from a fully-managed external vendor to in-house so we can manage this ourselves. I am familiar with SDLC projects, so a services/non-it systems project is new for me.

A Project Plan and high-level scope have been required, but I need some guidance on determining if Business Requirements and Functional Requirements documents are required for this services/non-it systems project? Because this is a transition project which does not require the development or building of any IT systems or infrastructure (we already have the servers to support the website), it can be compared to a construction or engineering project where Business Requirements and Functional Requirements documents don’t usually exist.

Usually Business Objectives are used to create the requirements and then functional and non-functional requirements are based on the requirements. If this is a transition project which is moving a service from Provider A (external) to Provider B (in-house), is a Business Requirements document required?

The primary business objective is to transition the managed services externally to in-house. If we look at the actual tasks and the work pieces involved in the project to successfully achieve the business objective, a few of these at a very high-level include:

• Documentation: Identifying and transferring support documentation
• HR: Employing new staff or employing existing vendor staff to manage the hosting serviced internally
• Processes: Obtaining from the vendor and introducing new processes to provide the same managed service

The primary constraints, or non-functional requirements if this were a systems/IT project, would be:

• No loss in service delivery during transition
• Adhering to company processes and SLAs

Are Business Requirements and Functional Requirements documents required, or would a series of plans (implementation plan, transition plan, continuity plan, SLA, etc.) be sufficient?
If a Business Requirements document is suggested, can you provide some examples of what actual business requirements, functional requirements and non-functional requirements would/could be? We anticipate on developing and/or acquiring hundreds of documents such as: support documentation, SLAs, troubleshooting guides, etc. Would we have hundreds of business requirements to address each document?

The expectation is to somehow create hundreds of "deliverables" from all of these documents so that each can be verified to ensure the transition is successful and nothing has been overlooked or missed. This is a highly critical project.

 

Thanks,
Bec