Project Scope Management #

The work of project scope management is to contain all the processes that make sure the project has all the work required for project completion. The project scope management goes through collect requirements, define scope, create WBS, validate scope, and lastly, control scope. Each process helps the project scope management to execute the action in a proper manner.

From a project perspective, the scope can refer to product scope and project scope. Both follow different structures and different challenges for the project completion. Product scope focuses on the features and functions that characterize the product services. Project scope on the other hand deals with delivering the product, service, and functions.

Project life cycles #

The cycles of project life can go from a predictive approach to an adaptive approach. In The predictive life cycle, the deliverables for the project get started at the very beginning of the project. If any changes have to be made in the scope are progressively managed. The adaptive cycle features deliverables being developed over multiple iterations.

Differences between the project cycles #

Starting stage #

Both cycles go through different priorities. A project that runs on adatp[tive life cycles is more focused to respond to high levels of changes. The scope of an adaptive cycle project is just a set of requirements and work that needs to be performed. This process gets called Backlog. At the very beginning of the adaptive project, the team behind the project determines how many of the highest-priority items on the backlog can be delivered for each iteration. The predictive life cycle has these processes run at the beginning of the project and updated if necessary.

Customer engagement #

The adaptive project cycle takes in sponsors or customer representatives to continuously engage with the project and provide feedback for better results. Here the process validates scope and control scope gets repeated for each iteration. In the world of the predictive project cycle, the validate scope occurs after each deliverable or phase review. Meanwhile, the control scope is always running in the background.

The System #

Predictive life cycle prefers to use backlogs to reflect on the current trends, while predictive projects use a baseline that can be changed only through formal change control procedures. It also works as a basis for comparison in performing validate scope and control scope processes.

Trends in Project Scope management #

As the global environment gets more complex, organizations all over the world are finding unique ways to stay at the top of the league. Various companies are not trying to find a new way to keep the competitive advantage in the market by defining, managing, and controlling requirement activities.

The trends and new practices for Project scope management includes 

• Finding out about new problems.
• Identifying the needs of business
• Creating proper solutions to meet the challenges
• The document, managing stakeholder requirements to meet the project objective
• Successful implementation of project service.

The role of conductive business analysis should be assigned to the person with sufficient business analysis skills and expertise. The business analyst should have a collaborative partnership with the project manager. They will need to understand each other’s roles and responsibilities for the project to reach the completing zone without any problem of stoppage or limitation of any kind.

The project manager trailers the project scope management process to the requirements of a project. Since not all the projects share the same tone, all of them are unique. It is the job project manager to tailor the project scope management to ensure it goes through poorer steps. Some of the critical steps are knowledge and requirement management, validation and control, development approach, stability of requirements, and governance.

Plan scope management #

This management takes care of the documents on the direction of the project through validation and controlling procedures. The critical part of this process is that it provides guidelines and direction on scope management. Once the predefined points are set the planned scope management process will begin. The scope management plan serves as a component of the overall project. Everything that gets down under the project scope management plan begins with an analysis of information contained in the project charter.

Collect Requirements #

This process handles determining, documenting, and managing stakeholders that are required to meet the objectives. The important part of the collect requirement is that it provides a basis for defining the product scope and project scope. Collect Requirement gets performed once or at any point in the project, as long as the point is predefined.

The success of the project depends on the stakeholder’s involvement in various aspects of the project. They will have to put some care in determining, documenting, and managing the requirements of the product, services. The requirements here need to be:

• Quantified and documented
• List the expectation of the sponsor, customer, and other stakeholders
• The documentation needs to be analyzed, recorded.
• They will work as a foundation of WBS.
• The system includes cost, schedule, quality planning, and production of requirements.s

Techniques behind collect requirements #

To make the collection requirements work, it goes through proper techniques to make work successful.

Expert Judgment #

Making the right type of decision without wasting precious time comes from experience and the knowledge of the person. The individual who is in charge must have training on the following topics below:

• Business analysis
• Requirements elicitation
• Requirements analysis
• Requirements documentation
• Diagramming techniques
• Facilitation
• Conflict management

These areas will vastly improve the team or individual to lead a better want to make good judgment that eliminates the problem without extending it to other sectors.

Data Gathering #

More Information helps the overall project stronger with easier to speculate on future happenings.

• Brainstorming – This process helps collect multiple ideas related to the project and its requirements.

• Interviews – It can be both a formal and informal approach to handle elicit information from stakeholders. Sometimes the interview sessions contain only an interviewer and an interviewee and the other time’s multiple interviews with the same amount of interviewees.

• Focus Group – A great way to know the expectation and attitudes of proposed products from prequalified stakeholders. Here the moderator of the group guides the group through a discussion to get information out of them.

• Surveys – Here is a set of written questions designed for a quick accumulation of information from a large number of people.

• Benchmarking – Benchmarking helps with better feedback on the products, processes, and practices.

Data analysis #

Data analysis techniques get used to handling document analysis. In the project, documentation analysis mainly consists of reviewing and assessing any relevant document information. Data analysis helps with agreements, business plans, business rules repositories, current process flows, marketing literature, problems logs, issue logs, policies and procedures, requests for proposals, and cases.

Decision Making #

Problems will be frequent in any department of any organization. The most effective way to deal with a problem is by applying a proper solution. Decision-making is what leads to creating a better answer for a complex challenge. It can be done by:

• Voting – A collective decision-making technique that includes techniques such as Unanimity, Majority, and Plurality.

• Autocratic Decision Making – Here the decision falls down to one individual for the group.

• Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis – The method follows a systematic analytical approach to establishing different factors behind ideas.

Data representation #

The techniques used for data representation are divided into two parts:

Affinity Diagram – this process groups a large number of ideas for review and further analysis.

Mind mapping – the idea from brainstorming sessions inserted into a single map that reflects similarities and differences between ideas to create new ideas.

Interpersonal And team skills #

Collective requirement requires the team skills to be used in the overall process:

• Nominal Group Technique

Basically, it offers a voting process in the brainstorming to rank the ideas and filter through various categories.

• Observation

It puts the individual in their environment to see how well they perform on their jobs. This helps them to give better feedback. When they are in their own environment, they will be able to articulate their requirements and responses better.

• Facilitation

It brings stakeholders to set up a session that focuses on product requirements. A well-facilitated group session will help build trust and foster relationships between members. This will overall have a positive impact on stakeholder consensus.

Context Diagram #

It is a visual depiction of the scope by showing the business system and the interaction between other systems. The context diagram shows both inputs and output from the business system.

Prototypes #

This method will help with obtaining the early feedback of the model of an expected product.  Normally, computer-generated 2D and 3D rendering of the finished product will show all sorts of problems and possible solutions attached to the model. prototype support goes through mock-up creation, user experimentation, feedback generation, and revision to make the model much better compared to what it was like in the starting stage.

Collect Requirement Output #

Requirements Documentation #

This method shows how individual requirements match the needs of the business for the completion of a project. The organization always categorizes the documentation element to different types, which allows for further refinements and details behind requirements. Some of them are business requirements, stakeholder requirements, solution requirements, translation and readiness requirements, project requirements, quality requirements.

Requirements traceability matrix #

The job of this method is to ensure each requirement is motivated towards business value by linking to the business and project objectives. It focuses on business needs, project objectives, scope, design, and development.

Define scope #

Development of the detailed description of the project and product happens in this process. It helps with describing the product, service, and result boundaries. Almost all requirements are identified and the collect requirements may not be included in the final project, the job of defining scope is to select the final project requirements from the requirements documentation. Then defined scope develops an informative description of the project, product, service or result.

It relies on deliverables, assumptions, and contractions that get started at the project initiation. As more information comes in, the definition of project scope gets created with greater specificity. updating risks, assumptions and constipation will take place only if necessary. Since define scope falls under iterative life cycle, a high-level vision will be developed with detailed scope determined one interaction at a time, and then it will switch to detailed planning for the next iteration.

Defined scope outputs #

Project scope statement #

Project scope documents the entire scope that includes the project and product scope. It details project deliverables and provides a simple description of the project scope to stakeholders. Project scope helps the project team to perform more detailed planning, guides, baselines for evaluating requests for changes or some additional work. The detailed project scope management helps with:

• Product scope description -elaborates the characteristics of the product

• Deliverables – it handles verifiable product, results, the capability of service, phase, ancillary results such as project management reports and documentation.
• Acceptance criteria – a set of conditions that are supposed to be met before the deliverable gets accepted.
• Project exclusions – identify what got excluded from the project.

The scope management differs from the project charter, a project charter contains high-level information meanwhile in the project scope management consists of detailed information of scope components.

Project documents updates #

The project documents can get updated during the defined scope process. The updates can happen to:

• Assumption log -updated with additional assumptions
• Requirements documentation- updated with additional or changed requirements
• Requirements traceability matrix – updated to reflect updates in requirement documentation.
• Stakeholder register – updated may happen as new stakeholders get hired to continue the process.

Create WBS #

This process divides the project variables and the work into smaller manageable components. But importantly, it provides a framework for what needs to be delivered. WBS performed one or any predefined points in the project. WBS is seen as a hierarchical decomposition of the total scope of work for the project team to finish the project and create required deliverables. The job of WBS is to organize and define the scope of the project and represents the work that is associated with the project scope statement.

WBS Tools and Techniques #

Expert Judgements #

Expertises get considered by talented individuals or groups. Any experience in working with a similar project will give valuable insight into the outlook and inner work of the project. That can be very helpful during project construction.

Decomposition #

Here the project scope and project delivered get divided into smaller manageable parts. The level of the decomposition is guided by the degree of control that is much needed to effectively manage the poet ct. Work at the lower level of WBS is called Work packages, Complexity of the project will have an impact on the level of details for work packages. 

Scope baselines #

It serves as an approved version of the scope statement, WBS, and associated WBS dictionary; it can be changed through a change control procedure.

Validate scope #

This process helps with formalizing acceptance of the finished project deliverables. The job of validating the scope is to bring objectivity to the acceptance process, which later increases the probability of the final product, service. The focus of Validate scope is about the correctness of the deliverables and reaching the quality requirements that are specified for the deliverables.

Validate scope techniques #

Here are the used tools and techniques that get used in Validate Scope.

• Inspection 

Contains activities such as measuring, examining, and validating.

• Decision Making 

Contains voting to reach the conclusion.

• Accepted Deliverables

Meeting the acceptance criteria for deliverables.

• Work performance information- 

Carries information about the project process.

• Change Request

Deliverables that may require change requests for defect repair.

Control Scope #

It helps with monitoring the status of the project, product scope, and managing changes to the scope baselines. It does an excellent job of maintaining the scope baseline during the project. It does take care of all the actual changes that can occur and integration for other control processes.

• Work performance information

Provides contextualized information about the performance of the project and product scope compared to the scope baseline.

• Change Request

Analyze the performance of the project that could end with a change request to schedule baselines and other components of the project management plan.

• Project Management plan updates

Any changes that get made to the project management plan go through the organizational change control process via a change request.

• Project Document Updates

More information usually pushes the documents to be updated as they make changes to lessons learned from the register, requirements documentation, and requirement traceability matrix.

Conclusion #

The scope of the project is to gather all the work that is needed for the project completion to happen in time without pushing the deadline to the limits. All the operations run under the scope management ensure the capability of the scope management. So it can go through all the proper steps to make the project run more effectively without any issue.  Each one of them plays a major role in creating perfect work balances both in terms of performance and documentation. So they will correlate with each other to push the project to the finish line.