Chapter 5: Project Scope Management

Project scope management can be defined as the processes involved in defining and controlling what is or is not included in a project. There are five main processes involved in project scope management such as scope planning, scope definition, creating the WBS, scope verification and scope control.

Scope planning is to decide how the scope will be defined, verified, controlled, and how the WBS will be created. The project’s size, complexity, importance, and other factors will affect how much effort is spent on scope planning. The scope management plan is a document that includes descriptions of how the team will prepare the project scope statement, create the WBS, verify completion of the project deliverables, and control requests for changes to the project scope.

Scope definition is to review the project charter and preliminary scope statement created during the initiation process and adding more information as requirements are developed and change requests are approved. Good scope definition is very important to project success because it helps improve the accuracy of time, cost, and resource estimates, it defines a baseline for performance measurement and project control, and it aides in communicating clear work responsibilities.

Creating the WBS is to subdivide the major project deliverables into smaller and more manageable components. A WBS is a deliverable-oriented grouping of the work involved in a project that defines the total scope of the project. WBS is a foundation document in project management because it provides the basis for planning and managing project schedules, costs, resources, and changes. There are five approaches to develop WBS such as using guidelines, the analogy approach, the top-down approach, the bottom-up approach, and the mind-mapping approach.

Scope verification is to formalize acceptance of the completed project scope by the stakeholders. This acceptance is often achieved by a customer inspection and then sign-off on key deliverables.

Scope control is to control changes to project scope. The main purpose for this process is to influence the factors that cause scope changes, assure changes are processed according to procedures developed as part of integrated change control, and manage changes when they occur. Variance is the difference process between planned and actual performance.

There are several suggestions for improving user input such as develop a good project selection process, have users on the project team, have regular meetings with defined agendas, deliver something to project users and sponsors on a regular basis, do not promise to deliver what cannot be delivered in a particular time-frame, and co-locate users with developers.

Besides, there are several suggestions in reducing incomplete and changing requirements such as develop and follow a requirements management process, employ techniques like prototyping, use case modeling, and Joint Application Design to understand user requirements thoroughly, put all requirements in writing and keep them current and readily available, create a requirements management database for documenting and controlling requirements, provide adequate testing to verify that the project’s perform as expected, and use a process for reviewing requested requirements changes from a systems perspective, emphasize completion dates, and allocate resources specifically for handling change requests.