As the project manager, you have many questions to ask about general needs. Examples of these questions are:
These questions should solicit the detailed requirements that are meaningful to you and your team.
Always gather needs at the beginning of a project. Also, when you take over a project that has already started, you must gather needs again to ensure that the original needs are still valid. They might have changed.
Finding Needs
Needs are documented in several places in project documents, including sections of the request for proposal (RFP), the statement of work (SOW), and descriptions of deliverables and evaluation criteria. Carefully review all the project documents to look for obvious and hidden needs.
Another important source of needs is the project sponsor. The sponsor can clarify what you have read in the project documentation. In some cases, you might find that not many needs have been documented, so the sponsor must provide them. The sponsor will also tell you who else you should talk to, such as stakeholders or customers of the sponsor, to enable you to clarify the needs of the project.