Project Scope Management
Project Scope Management includes the processes needed to ensure that the project includes only and all the work required to successfully complete the project. The approved detailed project scope statement and its associate Work Break down Structure and dictionary form the scope baseline of the project. This is then monitored, verified and controlled throughout the project life cycle.
Process included in Project Scope Management are:
Process included in Project Scope Management are:
- Collect Requirements: This is the process of defining and managing customer’s expectations, and documenting the needs of the stakeholders to meet the project objectives. The capturing and managing of requirements directly influences the project success. It is important that enough detail is documented as the project’s progress will need to be measured against this document once execution begins. Requirements become the foundation of the WBS and are needed to build cost, schedule and quality planning. They can be project requirements which can include – business requirements, project management requirements, delivery requirements etc. They can also be product requirements which can include – information about technical, performance, security requirements etc.
Tools and Techniques:
Group Creativity Techniques: These techniques include – Brainstorming, Nominal group technique (enhances brainstorming with a voting process that ranks the most useful ideas for further brainstorming), The Delphi Technique (a group of experts provides feedback regarding the responses from each round of requirements gathering) , Idea/mind mapping and Affinity diagram (large number of ideas are sorted into groups for analysis).
Outputs:
Requirements Traceability Matrix: It is a table that links requirements to their origin and traces them throughout the project life cycle and making sure that the documented plan is being delivered at the end of the project. It links each requirement to the business and project objectives, thus ensuring that each requirement adds business value.
- Define Scope: It develops the detailed description of the project and product. The details of the project scope is important as major deliverables, assumptions and constraints that are documented in project initiation phase are built based on the scope. Additional risks, assumptions and constraints are added once existing risks, assumptions and constraints are analyzed for completeness.
- Create WBS: The work breakdown structure is a deliverable – oriented hierarchical decomposition of the work needed to be done to accomplish project objectives and create the required deliverables, with each descending level representing an increasingly detailed definition of the project work [3]. The lowest level of the WBS components, called work packages contain the planned work and this is where the cost and activity durations can be reliably estimated and managed. For WBS, work refers to deliverables that are the result of effort and not the effort itself. The structure of the WBS can be created in many forms. For example, using the major deliverables as the first level of decomposition or using sub-projects or using phases of the project life cycle at the first level and then the product and project deliverables at the second level.
Outputs:
WBS dictionary: It is a document that supports the WBS. It provides more detailed descriptions of the components in the WBS, like work packages and control accounts.
- Verify Scope: This process formalizes acceptance of project deliverables. It includes reviewing the deliverables with the customer or sponsor and getting their acceptance. This process differs from quality control in the sense that this process is primarily concerned with the acceptance of the deliverables while quality control is concerned about their correctness.
- Control Scope: It monitors the status of the project and product scope and manages changes to the scope baseline. It ensures that all changes and recommended actions are process through the Integrated Change control process.