Predicting and Managing Scope

predicting and managing scope

Introduction

As a Project Manager, you have a lot of responsibility on your plate. One of the hardest challenges you will face in your career is predicting and staying on top of the scope of a project. The scope of a project is essentially the time, money, and people it takes to complete a project. As you can imagine scope can be very hard to predict especially for larger projects and to make it worse estimating wrong can be very harmful to the project as investors will not be happy about supplying more time, money or people to a problem that they want done as quickly and cheaply as possible.

Understanding Project Scope

Looking at this task it can feel incredibly daunting to try to estimate and maintain scope throughout the lifetime of a project, but don’t worry! There are steps you can take to make defining and maintaining scope a lot easier. The PMBOK (Project Management Body of Knowledge) recognizes six main steps in managing and defining the scope of a project.

Step 1 - Create a Scope Management Plan

Firstly create a scope management plan. This can involve establishing realistic objectives while meeting regularly to discuss the plan and evaluate if things are working or not and discussing what can be changed to make the plan more realistic.

Step 2 - Collecting Requirements

The next step is collecting requirements. This involves maintaining regular communication with shareholders to learn what their needs for the end product are. This can be done through a variety of methods including but not limited to consultations, focus group deliberations, surveys, facilitated workshops, group inspiration techniques, questionnaires and reviews, observations and archetypes. This is a very important step because if you and the project's shareholders don’t have the exact same idea for what the end product should look and act like then you can find yourself in a situation where you are happy with the end product but the shareholders disagree and it was all a waste of time, effort and money.

Step 3 - Defining Project Scope

Next it comes time to actually define the scope of your project. Once you have a firm grasp of the objectives that need to be completed and when they need to be completed, you can make a detailed breakdown of what needs to be done and when. This plan is based on all the requirements documentation plus the project charter and the scope management plan. This plan should be very carefully constructed and as realistic as possible to ensure that everyone is on the same page about how much time and resources a project will take. Especially since this document will be the basis for all work done on the project.

Step 4 - Create a Work Breakdown Structure (WBS)

The next step once you have defined the scope of your project is to create a work breakdown structure or WBS. This provides a hierarchical decomposition of what the project team needs to do to produce the correct deliverable. The descending levels of the WBS provide the reader with greater and greater detail of the project work as it descends. The point of the WBS is not to define how long the project will take. Instead, the WBS serves to break down what exactly needs to be done to complete the project in great detail.

Step 5 - Validating Scope

The next step is validating scope. This step is largely about customer satisfaction. When validating scope the deliverables are reviewed and inspected to ensure that the project is going the way it’s supposed to be. If shareholders or clients aren’t satisfied with the deliverables being presented they are sent back to be further revised. This can be very costly in time, money, and manpower so this is something to try to avoid whenever possible as a project manager. If the deliverable is accepted then no further work needs to be done. This process ensures quality control and gives clients and shareholders the opportunity to give feedback and have their voice heard.

Step 6 - Controlling Scope

The last major step as defined by the PMBOK is controlling scope. This takes place once the project is underway and involves looking at performance reports against project plans and examining times when the aspects of the project went over budget or took longer than expected and explaining why that was the case. This process serves to ensure that the project stays on track throughout the lifetime of the project and helps everyone understand when things didn’t go as planned and explains why. This can greatly help reduce the amount of time and money wasted on projects going over budget or being delivered late.

Common Concerns - Scope Creep

There are some common concerns to look out for when it comes to project scope. A big one is what’s called scope creep. Scope creep (or sometimes called “requirement creep”) is a name given to the phenomenon where project requirements tend to grow over the course of the project's lifetime. A project with a single deliverable can become five or a project with just one or two features can become seven. Sometimes customers change what they want midway through a project. Sometimes they ask for extra features or more bells and whistles and as the project manager you have to review these changes and determine how everything fits into the carefully laid plan in order to not let the scope get completely out of control. If approved changes to the project affect the timeline or cost of the project it’s important to update the work breakdown structure and project plan and inform everyone involved with the project to ensure that nobody is unpleasantly surprised. Keeping in mind the original scope estimate can help keep things grounded and help keep you from completely losing sight of the original project scope.

Conclusion

It’s important to keep in mind that customers and stakeholders may not fully understand the impact of the changes they want. As a project manager these are just a few of the challenges you need to keep in mind when organizing people to complete a major project but by carefully planning and keeping these steps in mind it can become easier to effectively lead a project that makes everyone happy in the end.

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