Project Scope

Management
Dr. Sundar Raj Vijayanagar
Professor
Digital Business,
Information Management and
Operational Excellence,
 Learning Objectives
 List key reasons why good project scope management is
important
 Describe the process of planning scope management
 Discuss methods for collecting and documenting
requirements to meet stakeholder needs and expectations
 Explain the scope definition process and describe the contents
of a project scope statement
 Discuss the process for creating a work breakdown structure
using the analogy, top-down, bottom-up, and mind-mapping
approaches
 Learning Objectives
 Explain the importance of validating scope and how it relates to
defining and controlling scope
 Given an IT project situation, show how recommended
approaches for controlling scope can improve project success
 Describe how software can assist in project scope management
 Discuss considerations for agile/adaptive environment
 Introduction
 Scope refers to all the work involved in creating the products of
the project and the processes used to create them.
 A deliverable is a product created as part of a project.
 Deliverables can be product related, such as a piece of hardware
or software, or process related, such as a planning document or
meeting minutes.
 Project stakeholders must agree what the products of the project
are and
 To some extent, how they should be produced.
 What is Project Scope?

Definition:
Scope refers to the detailed set of deliverables or
features of a project. These deliverables are derived
from a project’s requirements.
PMBOK® defines Project Scope as the “The work that
needs to be accomplished to deliver a product, service,
or result with the specified features and functions.”
 Scope Management

 Scope management, or rather the lack of it, is one of

the biggest reasons for project failure.
 Correctly defining what is and is not included in the
project is foundational to good project management.
 It includes the processes that ensure all of the required
work (and only the required work!) is included in the
project.
 Importance of Scope Management?

Project scope management helps avoid a number of

common problems such as:
 Being reminded that the actual result was less than
anticipated
 Regularly changing requirements

 Change your direction of the project once you are about

halfway.
 Re-examining the budget discussion

 Fail to meet the project deadlines

 Scope Management
Scope management has 6 process
1. Plan Scope Management: Planning the process and creating a scope
management plan. It involves determining how the project’s scope and
requirements will be managed.
2. Collect Requirements: Defining and documenting the stakeholder’s
needs.
3. Define Scope: Developing a detailed project scope statement.
4. Create WBS: Subdividing project deliverables into smaller work units.
5. Validate Scope: Formalizing the acceptance of the deliverables.
6. Control Scope: The ongoing process of monitoring and managing
changes to the project scope.

 Planning Scope Management
 The first step in project scope management is planning how the
scope will be managed throughout the life of the project.
 The inputs for this process are reviewing the project
management plan, project charter, enterprise environmental
factors, and organizational process assets
 The project team uses expert judgment, data analysis, and
meetings as tools to develop two important outputs:
 the scope management plan and

 the requirements management plan

 The scope management plan is a subsidiary part of the project

management plan
 Planning Scope Management
 Itcan be informal and broad or formal and detailed, based
on the needs of the project
 In fact, small projects may not need a written scope
management plan, but large projects or highly technical
projects often benefit from one.
 In general, a scope management plan includes the
following information:
 How to prepare a detailed project scope statement
 How to create a WBS

 How to maintain and approve the WBS

 How to obtain formal acceptance of the completed project

deliverables
 How to control requests for changes to the project scope
 Requirements Management Plan
 Another important output of planning scope management is
the requirements management plan
 The 1990 IEEE Standard Glossary of Software Engineering
Terminology defines a requirement as follows
1. A condition or capability needed by a user to solve a problem
or achieve an objective.
2. A condition or capability that must be met or possessed by a
system or system component to satisfy a contract, standard,
specification, or other formally imposed document.
3. A documented representation of a condition or capability
 PMBOK® Guide defines a requirement as “a condition or
capability that is necessary to be present in a product,
service, or result to satisfy a business need
 Requirements Management Plan
 For software projects, it is helpful to divide requirements
development into the software engineering steps called
elicitation, analysis, specification, and validation.
 These steps include all the activities involved in gathering,
evaluating, and documenting requirements for a IT project
 It is also important to use an iterative approach to defining
requirements because they are often unclear early in a
project
 Requirements Management Plan
 This document specifies how project requirements will be
analyzed, documented, and managed.
 A requirements management plan can include the following
information
 How to plan, track, and report requirements activities
 How to perform configuration management activities

 How to prioritize requirements

 How to use product metrics

 How to trace and capture attributes of requirements

 Collect Requirements

 The second step in project scope management is often the

most difficult: collecting requirements.
 A major consequence of not defining requirements well is
rework
 The rework can consume up to half of project costs,
especially for software development projects.
 As illustrated in Figure, it costs much more (up to 30 times
more) to correct a software
 Collect Requirements

 BABOK ® Defines four different types of requirements

1. Business Requirements
2. Stakeholders Requirements
3. Solution Requirements
i. Functional
ii. Non-Functional
4. Transition Requirements
 Requirement Traceability Matrix
 In addition to preparing requirements documentation, project
teams often create a requirements traceability matrix
(RTM).
 An RTM is a table that lists requirements, their various
attributes, and the status of the requirements to ensure that all
are addressed.
 Remember that the main purpose of an RTM is to maintain
the linkage from the source of each requirement through its
decomposition to implementation and validation.
 Search the Internet for more detailed examples of an RTM.
Sample RTM
 Defining Project Scope
• The next step in project scope management is to
provide a detailed definition of the work required for
the project.
• Good scope definition is very important to project
success
• It helps improve the accuracy of time, cost, and
resource estimates,
• It defines a baseline for performance measurement and
project control, and
• It aids in communicating clear work responsibilities.
Defining Project Scope
 Scope Definition
 Project scope statements should include at least
a product scope description,
 product user acceptance criteria, and

 detailed information on all project deliverables.

 It is important to document other scope-related information,

such as
 theproject boundaries,
 constraints, and

 assumptions

 Note: information from the project charter provides a basis

for further defining the project scope.
 Scope Definition
References:
The project scope statement should reference supporting
documents, such as product specifications that will affect
what products are created or purchased
It should reference corporate policies, which might affect
how products or services are produced.
Many IT projects require detailed functional and design
specifications for developing software, which also should be
referenced in the detailed scope statement
 Creating WBS

After collecting requirements and defining scope, the next

step in project scope management is to create a work
breakdown structure (WBS)
Definition:
Deliverable oriented hierarchical decomposition of the work
to be executed by the team to accomplish the project
objectives and create the required deliverables.
Purpose: Organizes and defines the total scope of project

Project Management: What is a Work Breakdown Structure?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wEWhnodF6ig
 WBS
 The WBS provides the basis for planning and managing
project schedules, costs, resources, and changes.
 Because the WBS defines the total scope of the project,
some project management experts believe that work should
not be done on a project if it is not included in the WBS.
 Therefore, it is crucial to develop a complete WBS
 WBS
 The project management plan, project documents, enterprise
environmental factors, and organizational process assets are
the primary inputs for creating a WBS.
 In addition to expert judgment, the main tool or technique is
decomposition—that is, subdividing project deliverables into
smaller pieces.
 The outputs of the process of creating the WBS are the scope
baseline and project documents updates.
 The scope baseline includes the approved project scope
statement and its associated WBS and WBS dictionary.
 Work Breakdown Structure

Project
Project X
X

Level 1

Level 2

Level 3

Level 4

http://templatelab.com/wbs/
 WBS Guidelines
 Determine how you will name WBS items.
 Some organizations use only nouns to focus on describing
deliverables, as PMI recommends.
 For example, instead of using the words “define
requirements” on a WBS, use “requirements definition.”
 Activities on a schedule below requirements definition would
include verb phrases
 You can breakdown the project tasks as far as you need to in
order for you to be able to properly
 Manage the task
 Estimate the time required to complete the task

 Estimate the cost involved in completing the tasks

 WBS Development Guidelines
 Stop breaking down work when you reach a low enough
level to do an estimate of the desired accuracy
 Involve those people who must do the work in the planning
process
 The WBS must be consistent with the way work actually
will be performed
 It should serve the project team first and serve other
purposes only if practical.
 WBS Development Guidelines
 A unit of work should appear in only one place in the WBS.
 The WBS should be completed before the schedules are
worked out
 A WBS item is the responsibility of only one person, even
though many people might be working on it
 The WBS doesn’t have to be symmetrical
 Work Package in WBS
 A work package is a task at the lowest level of the WBS.
 A work package also represents the level of work that the
project manager monitors and controls.
 You can think of work packages in terms of accountability
and reporting.
 If a project has a relatively short time frame and requires
weekly progress reports, a work package might represent
work completed in one week or less
Work Package Vs Activity
Product Development Activity List
Phase Based WBS
Deliverable Based WBS
Team Based Structure
 Validating Scope
 Scope validation involves formal acceptance of the
completed project deliverables.
 This acceptance is often achieved by a customer inspection
and then sign-off on key deliverables.
 To receive formal acceptance of the project scope, the
project team must develop clear documentation of the
project’s products and procedures to evaluate whether they
were completed correctly and satisfactorily.
 To minimize scope changes, it is crucial to do a good job of
configuration management and validating project scope
 Validating Scope
 The main inputs for scope validation are
 The project management plan,
 project documents,

 verified deliverables, and

 work performance data

 The main tools for performing scope validation are

 inspection and
 decision-making techniques

 The main outputs of scope validation are

 accepted deliverables,
 change requests,

 work performance information, and

 project documents updates

 Controlling Scope
 Scope control involves managing changes to the project scope
while keeping project goals in mind.
 Users often are not sure of what functionality they will need
to improve business performance.
 Developers are not exactly sure how to interpret user
requirements,
 They also have to deal with constantly changing technologies.
 The goal of scope control is
 To influence the factors that cause scope changes,
 To ensure that changes are processed according to procedures
developed as part of integrated change control
 Controlling Scope
 The main inputs to scope control are
 The project management plan,
 project documents,

 work performance data, and

 organizational process assets

 An important tool for performing scope control is data

analysis, including variance analysis.
 Variance is the difference between planned and actual
performance.
 Controlling Scope
 The outputs of scope control include
 work performance information,
 change requests,

 project management plan updates, and

 project documents updates

 Controlling Scope
 Suggestions for improving user inputs (Page 228)
 Suggestions for reducing incomplete and change
requirements (Page 229-230)
 Summary
 Project scope management includes the processes to ensure
that the project addresses all the work required to complete
the project successfully.
 The main processes include planning scope management,
collecting requirements, defining scope, creating the WBS,
validating scope, and controlling scope
 The first step in project scope management is planning scope
management.
 The project team reviews information and uses expert
judgment and meetings to help create a scope management
plan and requirements management plan
 Summary
 The next step is collecting requirements.
 It is important to review the project charter and meet with
key stakeholders when collecting requirements.
 The main outputs of this process are requirements
documentation and a requirements traceability matrix.
 Next step is to prepare a project scope statement in the scope
definition process.
 There are often several versions of the project scope
statement to keep scope information detailed and up to date
 Summary
 The scope document includes
 scope description,
 user acceptance criteria,

 detailed information on all project deliverables,

 information on project boundaries,

 constraints, and

 assumptions.

 A work breakdown structure (WBS) is a deliverable-

oriented grouping of the work involved in a project that
defines its total scope.
 The WBS forms the basis for planning and managing
project schedules, costs, resources, and changes.
 Summary
 A good WBS is often difficult to create because of the
complexity of the project.
 There are several approaches for developing a WBS,
 using guidelines,
 the analogy approach,

 the top-down approach,

 the bottom-up approach, and

 Mind mapping

 Validating scope involves formal acceptance of the

completed project deliverables.
 Controlling scope involves controlling changes to the project
scope
 Project

Phase 1
1.Select a suitable project of your interest
2.Develop a project charter for the selected project
3.Identify scope of the project.
4.Create WBS for the project to deliver the solution
5.Develop a suitable Project Plan