Data analytics projects have become a common accomplishment in many enterprises. However, establishing a data analytics project requires consideration of many factors that are not always recognized at the very beginning of the project. This study seeks to identify what generic requirements must be defined for data analytics projects and proposes a requirements template for the generic requirements. The use of the template can reduce the complexity of starting the analytics projects by providing a checklist of necessary requirements to be considered at the beginning of the project. The template is derived from the analysis of eight data analytics project reports for descriptive and diagnostic analytics tasks validated against the two more accomplished analytics project reports. Additionally, the template has been applied to two ongoing projects to demonstrate the utility of the template within a project context.