COEPD – Center of Excellence for Professional Development Happy Learning
A Project is a well-planned and structured framework of list of activities and planning in behind to achieve a specific goal. Whenever a need arises into any business, it brings some idea. And that idea to create something new or improve generates business requirements which a business has to fulfil. To convert those business requirements into technical solutions, project management team comes into picture. This Project management team perform few operations before starting the development, like enterprise analysis, business GAP analysis, Market Analysis, Stakeholder Analysis, Requirement elicitation through various means, Analysing and validation of those requirements and prioritisation of those requirements, Assumptions, Constraints, SWOT analysis and many more. After Analysing all the factors, a product roadmap is created to achieve that specific goal.
A Project Scope is a document which sets the boundary of a project and all the Goals, Objectives, Deliverables, Inclusions, Exclusions of project, budget, delivery deadline, Constraints and milestones are included in this document. This Document works as a Roadmap which is created before starting a project and a sign off is taken onto this document from client as a record of all the business requirements and functions a project will work on and is agreed between project stakeholders and business stakeholders.
Project manager is primarily responsible person for this project scope document and management of a project throughout the journey of Project completion. A project may run for a shorter duration to a longer duration and project manager ensures that the required work as per the scope of the project gets performed and delivered on time and within the budget and does not fall into scope creep.
Management of a project scope is very much crucial since it sets the boundary that what all operations and functions will be included in this project and upcoming change request coming from client if any will fall into the project scope or will fall outside so that those changes can be moved to next project as an extension of the project. Scope document should be very specific, precise and clear in terms of project requirement and acceptance criteria.
A project scope document primarily includes:-
Problem Statement: The reason or problem behind the need arise
Project Scope Description: How this product will help to solve the problem
Project Objective: End objective of this project
Requirements: What all requirements will be fulfilled requested by different stakeholders?
In-Scope: In- Scope functionalities
Out-Scope: Out of scope functionalities, which if requested can be excluded for the defined project
Cost and Budget Estimates: What would be approx. cost and what should be the budget
Time: Deadline to complete the project. It should also include the buffer time so that it doesn’t get delayed after that
Resources: What all resources will be required to complete the project. Whether all H/W and S/W resources are available
Acceptance Criteria: What would be the acceptance criteria of the project based on service level agreement?
Project Assumptions: Certain events that are expected to occur during the project
Project Constraints: Some constraints that may affect the completion of project
Project Milestone: When a stakeholder can expect a particular deliverable to be completed
Once this Project scope document is defined, Project manager assures at every milestone that project is running on stipulated timeframe and within budget and most importantly within the defined scope.
