Project scope management processes.

Project scope is a way to set boundaries and detailed outline of all aspects of project and define exactly on what deadlines, costs, goals, tasks, deliverables you will be working towards. It is a part of project planning that involves determining and documenting all these project activities. Project scope also outlines assumptions and constraints, processes, key stakeholders as well as what is included and what isn’t and what the project is all about. In the project scope statement all this essentials information is documented.

Project scope management is a process that helps documenting, determining and understand entire project process lists including goals, deliverables, tasks, deadlines and budget as a part of project planning process. In a big project it is very common to have modification and if the project scope is defined right in the beginning it helps to make it easy for the team to deal with the changes and to manage and run the project. It also helps to eliminate redundant or unnecessary work by ensuring the task which are included in the project are the only tasks which are really necessary for the completion of the project.

1) Planning the scope management

In the project scope management process, the first step is to create a scope plan document that you can refer to in later stages. This document would inform you and your team as how you should define, manage, validate and control the project’s scope. This would be done by speaking to all the project’s stakeholders and executives and develop a cohesive understanding of the project’s scope. The information of how you will respond to constraints and roadblocks, how you will determine project success and other vital elements of plan will be included in this plan along with detailed project scope statement, breakdown of all the project requirements, expected project deliverables and project change control process also. It doesn’t have to be very detailed.

2) Collecting requirements

Next step would be to gather all the requirements for this project. Here you will document all the project expectations, project needs and requirements, budget and deliverables, deadlines to be successful by sending out survey or bringing people in focus group and interview. This is an important step because the stakeholders can have unrealistic expectations or requirements and the project manager have to find a solution that would be acceptable by everyone to avoid project delay.

3) Defining the scope

Here the requirements that has been gathered would be turned into a well detailed description of the service or product that you are trying to build or deliver through this project. This would serve as a project scope statement that the team can refer throughout the year. As much as it is important to include what in-scope of the project it is equally important to note what is out-scope of the project. Because inclusion of anything which was out of scope will result in delay as it would have to go through entire change control process to ensure that the team is working only on things that they are supposed to work on. Something which is not included in the project scope doesn’t need to be completed by the team.

4) Making a project work breakdown structure

It is a document which breaks down the project’s work and assign tasks to responsible parties and describes the team and individuals what deliverables they are responsible for and at what amount of time. Project management software can be used to assign track and prioritize project’s task.

5) Validate the scope

In this process next step would be to get the work approved by the stakeholders and project executives who then gives the necessary approvals to go ahead or to change something. Having high ups reviews and approval of work is important because if anything goes wrong it is not solely responsibility of the project manager. During this step stakeholder and the team would have agreed on the deliverables that would make a project success.

6) Controlling the project scope

It is the duty of the project manager to monitor the project status, ensure that the project stays within the define scope and if in case there are somethings that need to change as they often do, it should be informed to the stakeholders by the project manager so as to adjust the scope accordingly. All the requested changes and recommended corrective or preventive actions should be processed through the integrated change control process. To ensure all the members of the team are tracked on how much have they succeed, weekly and bi-weekly performance report can be analysed, this can be one simple way to control the scope of the project.