Project Scope Management Processes

In project management, a scope refers to the goals and objectives of a project and what needs to be done by the project team in order to achieve them. 

A project manager is usually responsible for defining the project scope after taking inputs from key stakeholders. The project manager needs to define the timelines, budgets, process or tasks,resources, assumptions and constraints while preparing the scope document.

Project Scope Management is the process which ensures that a particular project includes all the relevant work which is necessary to achieve the project’s objectives.

The primary aim of project scope management is to decide what is to be included and what should not be included in the project.

The scope management process enables the project manager to assign and allocate just the right amount of work which is necessary to complete a project.

Following are the steps of project scope management-

a)Scope planning- This is the first step in scope management wherein the project manager will gather inputs from all the stakeholders by following the elicitation techniques like conducting brainstorming session, interviews, focus groups and prototyping and collaborate with them to decide and document how they want to define, manage, validate and control the project scope. The scope management plan also includes how the team will handle unforeseen circumstances, dictates the roles and responsibilities to the team on accepting the project deliverables, and plans how the team will come up with work breakdown structure and a scope statement.

b)Define scope- Once the project scope is in place, the project manager will come up with a project scope statement which clearly defines what is in scope of the project and what is out of the scope of the project. This document will guide the project team throughout the project in delivering the project objectives.

Project scope statement defines what are the goals and objectives of the project, what are the key deliverables the project team needs to work towards, how much time and budget is needed to complete the project, what is included in project and what is not included in the project, what are the resources involved, what are the assumptions and constraints involved and the processes to be followed by the team to achieve the goals of the project.

c)Create a work breakdown structure- In this step, based on the requirements gathered from the stakeholders and the project scope statement, the entire project is broken down into several smaller tasks and a work breakdown structure is created. The project manager will define the key deliverables and assign roles and responsibilities to the project team. Thus the team will then be able to deliver more efficiently once the responsibilities are assigned.

d)Validate scope- In this step, the project deliverables will be reviewed by clients so a proper plan needs to be in place which defines how the deliverables are marked as complete and approved by the stakeholders once reviewed. So, a validation process should be set up ahead of time so that the stakeholders can view the completed tasks all at one place and be immediately notified once a task is awaiting approval.

e)Control Scope- A Project manager needs to monitor the project status from start to finish to ensure it is executed according to the pre-defined project scope management plan.

The project manager should be ready to accept change requests from the stakeholders at any time during the project which may change the scope of the project so they should timely monitor the performance reports and identify the gaps, if any, to bring the project back on track.