This working paper is aimed at providing guidance to ICT administrations in parliaments on the available approaches for developing and consolidating requirements for ICT systems. It intends to offer useful guidelines on how to raise stakeholder involvement and secure their support during the critical start-up phase of ICT system implementations. The audience that this paper aims at includes decision makers and ICT administrators in parliaments, as well as ICT project managers and system analysts who are technically responsible for implementing systems that meet user needs.

Often when an ICT system implementation project starts, project teams immediately get into the details of requirements even before they have established the project scope supported by a proper understanding of the real needs for the system and the stakeholder community or the constraints under which it is to be built. Starting to define requirements without this kind of foundation often causes problems during the project. Some projects are completed before the team realizes that the system produced does not meet any of the stakeholders' real needs and expectations. To avoid these kinds of problems, it is useful that project teams consider and try to adopt simple, but valuable guidelines to establish a good understanding of the stakeholder community, demonstrate an understanding of the problem to be solved by the ICT intervention, capture the real needs of the stakeholders and the system features required to fulfill these needs and ensure that the views of the stakeholder community are actively and appropriately represented and communicated throughout the project.