COEPD – Center of Excellence for Professional Development Happy Learning
Project scope management process describes the outline of all the tasks that contains within the project that are scope, time, outcome and budget. It determines how the whole project team will carry out the process and work in order to deliver the project outcome with all the specified features and function that the client or stakeholders are in need of.
Scope in project management refers to output, benefits and deliverables of a project and what all is required to achieve them. It is very important to define the scope in the beginning so that the project you are working on doesn’t lose the track because once it goes off track, it will be a challenge to meet the project goals and objectives. Usually, a project manager is responsible for defining the project scope by taking inputs from client or stakeholders. The importance of scope management process is to keep your project and work on right path despite any obstacles, complications, variables that may impact the process.
Steps for Scope Management Process:
Here are certain steps to help you and your team to understand how proper planning will get your team work on right path and achieve success
1. Plan your project scope
The First step is to build a scope management plan through which one can define, validate and control the scope of the project. This particular process will provide you a guidance and direction for managing the scope through your project.
2. Gather the requirements
To gather the requirements, you need stakeholders and for that you need to identify the stakeholders. By preparing Requirement Traceability Matrix you can identify the stakeholders who will provide you the requirements for the project. This particular step will give you a clear idea about wants and needs of the stakeholders and how will you handle their expectations. The requirements can be gathered through the elicitation techniques like survey/questionnaire, interview or by create prototypes and then document all the requirements discussed.
3. Define your project scope
In this step, the project manager will define actual work that needs to be done in order to meet the project goals and objective. It is the responsibility of a project manager to define the scope of a project after receiving, understanding the needs, goals, requirements gathered from the stakeholders. The project must be documented or hand written because it is important to mention what’s not there in the project scope because don’t let the team members to do redundant or irrelevant work and if they are being told to perform the tasks out of the scope, they will have a proof.
4. Create a Work Breakdown Structure (WBS)
Breaking down the task and assigning those tasks to the responsible member is called work breakdown structure. Based on the project scope and the requirements collected you need to prepare work breakdown structure. This particular document tells the project team that they are responsible for this task and for this much amount of time. The project manager should divide the work into manageable tasks and ensure that everyone is working on their given tasks and keep a check on the progress. When the tasks are divided and distributed among the team members it becomes more easier and faster in order to reach towards the project goal.
5. Validate your project scope
In this step your project work needs to be get approved by the client or stakeholders or managers. This step is also important because there needs to be someone who checks your work, go through the progress of the project and not one single person is solely responsible. They give review to your work done, any requirements are being missed out or some change request the client wants to initiate so the team can go back and work on it and then project manager needs to check up those modifications are being done or not. Once everything is approved you can apply it to the project scope statement.
6. Control project scope
The last step in the project scope management is Control scope. Monitoring and controlling the status of the project from beginning till the end is important to check that is your project working according your goals set. When the whole project is executed, the project manager needs to ensure that project stays within the defined scope. We might don’t know when scope may need to change or client initiates any new requirements for that performance report needs to be compared with project requirements.
