Planning: requirements gathering, scope statement, work breakdown structure (WBS) and WBS dictionary

Planning turns the charter's high-level view into a plan the team can follow, and scope planning comes first because everything else, the schedule, budget and risk register, is built on it. It begins with requirements: the conditions or capabilities the product must have. Business requirements describe why the organization needs it ('reduce password-reset calls by half'); functional requirements describe what the product must do ('users can reset their own password'); non-functional requirements describe qualities such as performance, availability, security, usability and accessibility ('the reset page loads in under two seconds and supports multifactor authentication'). Missing non-functional requirements are a classic cause of systems that work in a demo but fail in production.