Project Scope management processes

In the present era where maximum work is done remotely and communication happening online, it is essential to have a clear and effective project scope.

Before going through the step-by-step process of project scope management, we need to understand what Project scope management is and why it is important to manage Project Scope. So, Let’s start with what is project scope management. It defines all the work, which are included in the project. These works are tasks, objective, input, output, timelines and budget. It is the process to determine what the team needs to do in order to deliver the project.

Next question is why it is important to manage the Project scope. During the project, there are high chances that the team will waste time on doing non-value added activities and wasting time in thinking what they should do next. To avoid these situations, it is important to manage project scope.

There are few steps to be followed in project scope management process:

• Planning of project scope: During the project planning process, it is important to plan project scope by having discussion with key stakeholders on how to define, manage, validate and control the project scope. This step is essential in change management process as it help us to deal with ad-hoc changes in the requirement, resources allocation, budget allocation etc. In addition to this planning is needed for the team to accept the project deliverables and their responsibilities to achieve these deliverables.

• Get a grip on requirement management: This is an essential step to determine the stakeholder’s requirement and how the team is going to manage their requirements. All the requirements need to be documented. These requirements are gathered through different elicitation techniques. During the project life cycle, stakeholder should be frequently communicated on progress and hurdles.
• Define scope: In this step, the team needs to define a project scope statement which is essential to understand what is and out of scope in the project. This acts as a backbone in the project and helps the team to refer whenever a requirement is added or update.

The scope statement answers the following question:

          Why is the project initiated?

          What are we trying to achieve?

          What are the project deliverables and who is responsible for it?

          What are the assumptions, dependencies, inclusion and exclusions?

          What is the expected result?

• Work Breakdown structure creation: This means breaking down the entire project into smaller tasks. It is the important step as WBS allows the team to be more focus and to get clear understanding on the goals

• Scope Validation: It is important to define a plan for the validation of scope as it makes easier to accept the deliverables by the customers. This outlines how the project deliverables will be accepted by the customers. The team can set up a step-by-step formal approval process at every stage of the tasks to avoid long email chains and multiple meetings.

• Control Project Scope: Project scope monitoring and controlling is an essential step throughout the project. The project status should be monitored end to end to check if it is being executed according to project scope management plan. In order to avoid scope creep, the team should check the project progress frequently with the performance reports and project requirements.

In the end, a good project scope is the most important step in the whole software development process as it guides the direction of the project and helps the team to achieve project deliverables in time and within budget.