After ensuring enterprise support for the PMS initiative, the designation of a PMS project team is essential for determining the PMS project scope, planning the PMS selection activities and time frames, performing PMS selection activities, and delivering the PMS project objectives. One of the initial activities performed by the PMS project team is conducting a needs analysis and assessment. The organizational, non-functional, and functional scope factors designated for analyzing the organization’s PMS needs should be itemized in the form of a checklist for PMS features, functions, and criteria.

The organizational scope factors are introduced in “Page 1: Analyze Organization's PMS Needs” and include criteria derived from the analysis of the organization’s culture and project management environment. The factors of an organization’s culture typically include considerations such as the degree of empowerment, collaboration, information sharing, and governance; project management environment factors typically identify the project management structure (i.e., Project, Program, Portfolio, and Project Management Office), project methods and standards adopted, and resource allocations.

The non-functional criteria include considerations such as:

ease-of-use,
device or platform interoperability,
accessibility, and
scalability.

Ease-of-use addresses training requirements or the intuitiveness of the application as well as the administrative complexity of the PMS. The device interoperability stipulates the variety of devices (e.g., desktop, mobile devices, or smartphones) or information interchange between IT systems required for effective operations, while accessibility involves information-sharing requirements, security, and the degree of connectivity (local, remote, anywhere) needed.

The functional criteria address the automated support requirements for the specific activities performed in the practice of project management. The PMS’ functional project management support may address the following activities: project feasibility assessment and selection, project risk management, project communications management, project scope planning including work breakdown structure development, project task management, project cost and estimate management, project schedule management, project resource management and time tracking, project invoicing, earned value management, project audit and governance compliance, and stakeholder management.

Once the PMS functions, features, and other criteria have been itemized, they should be ranked by order of priority and weighted by value contributed to the organization. Table 1 illustrates a practical approach for PMS functional criteria priority ranking. Additionally, each PMS criterion may be assigned a weighting factor, as illustrated in Table 2, which used in conjunction with the priority in a mathematical function yields a metric for quantitative PMS selections evaluation. The culmination of the elicitation and analysis activities yields a prioritized and weighted itemization of PMS checklist criteria.

Table 1. Prioritization Schema for PMS Functional Criteria
Priority	Description	Priority Score
Critical	An essential criterion for PMS stakeholder acceptance	7
Important	A necessary criterion for PMS functionality.	5
Highly Desirable	A useful but deferrable PMS capability criterion.	3
Desirable	A nice to have optional criterion.	1

Table 2. Weighting Schema for PMS Functional Criteria
Priority	Description	Priority Score
Customer Value	PMS criterion needed to satisfy customer value proposition.	5
Strategic Value	PMS criterion needed to achieve mission or goal results.	3
Project Value	PMS criterion needed to advance project management maturity.	1

The prioritized and weighted itemization of PMS checklist criteria becomes a key component of the PMS functional requirements specification (FRS), which documents the PMS’ business needs and its functional and operational use criteria. Although the FRS is typically used in the context of systems engineering or software development, in this consideration, the FRS describes the overarching objectives of the PMS, delineates assumptions and constraints, identifies significant enterprise risks, and incorporates the PMS checklist criteria as well as the method of identifying and evaluating PMS solutions. The FRS document is the central guiding reference for identifying and evaluating project management systems and associated components or supplementary systems (PMI, 2017). See the sample FRS templates from Smartsheets and Asana.