Management of external requirements for projects: how parent organizations can help

Well known to engineering project managers is that all projects, no matter what their final products are, should practice rigorous management of the project´s requirements. Although external requirements have long been part of many engineering projects, the modern project environment contains more and more management and technical requirements levied by organizations external to the project. For many projects the scope of this challenge is large and growing. New requirements are constantly being flowed down to projects from political, regulatory, legal, and international entities, and from projects´ parent organizations as well. One effective response to this challenge is for project parent organizations to assist in identifying, defining, and flowing down to projects the ever-growing number of external requirements. This paper will describe how the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) has developed and deployed institutional mechanisms to identify, define, and flow down technical and programmatic requirements which are generated external to the projects