Plan scope management process tools and techniques transforms inputs to outputs. Plan Scope Management is the process, where you figure out how you perform the rest of the processes in the scope management knowledge area. All the knowledge areas in PMBOK follows the same structure. You first plan, how you wanted to perform the rest of the processes in that knowledge area.
Plan Scope Management Process
So, plan scope management is the blue print of how you perform all other scope management processes in your project.
Essentially, plan scope management process determines the approach of how you
- Gather the requirements
- Define the scope of your project
- Create the WBS and arrive at work packages to deliver
- Control and Validate the scope of the project
The plan scope management process helps you to brainstorm and think about everything, that you must do, to keep your project focus on what to deliver as per your project scope.
When to Perform Plan Scope Management Process
When to perform the plan scope management process? This determines the inputs to the plan scope management process.
When to Perform Plan Scope Management Process?
Project charter is an important input to this process, as this already contains the high level scope of the project. So project charter is certainly, a good candidate to start with. Hence the output of develop project charter is an input to plan scope management process.
Project management plan is an input to plan scope management process. And scope management plan is an input to develop project management plan.
Isn’t tricky. Yes. Because project management plan is made up of lot of subsidiary management plans. So when you are developing scope management plan, there may be high chances that you can reuse some of the information and approach that you are considering for creating other subsidiary plans such as time management plan, cost management plan, communication management plan, etc.
Plan Scope Management Process Tools and Techniques, Inputs And Outputs
As we have seen earlier, the primary inputs of plan scope management process are the outputs of develop project charter and develop project management plan processes.
Plan scope management process tools and techniques converts the inputs to outputs. Plan scope management process tools and techniques are expert judgement and meetings.
There are two outputs of plan scope management process. They are Scope Management Plan and Requirements Management Plan.
Plan Scope Management Process ITTOs
Plan Scope Management Process Inputs
- Eventually, project charter contains a high level description of the project scope, the deliverables in the project, and important or high level milestones of the project. So project charter would be a good starting point to plan for the scope management processes.
- As we have seen, the ideas and approaches in some of the other subsidiary management plans can be useful while developing scope management plan. Please note most of these subsidiary plans will be developed in parallel. Hence it is a good idea to reuse some ideas, information, etc. from other subsidiary plans into the plan scope management process.
- Your organization may have best practices on how to management the project scope. This may impact the way you are planning of scope management in your project.
- Organizational process assets might have historical scope management plans from historic projects, which may be of help instead of starting everything from scratch.
Plan Scope Management Process Tools and Techniques
The plan scope management process tools and techniques are expert judgement and meetings.
- Expert Judgement – Taking help from experts, who dealt with the similar process of creating the scope management plans in other projects.
- Meetings with stakeholders may help to discuss and agree your approach and plan towards managing the rest of the scope management processes.
Plan Scope Management Process Outputs
The plan scope management process produces two primary outputs.
- Scope Management Plan
- Requirements Management Plan
Both the scope management plan and requirements management plan help you to determine what is in the scope of your project and what is not.
What is Scope Management Plan?
Scope Management plan lets you determine the processes, you and your project team will follow as
- How you document scope as you learn more about the project scope
- How you create the work breakdown structure from it
- And finally how you validate and control the scope of the project.
What is Requirements Management Plan
On the other hand, requirements management plan tells you the approach of
- How to collect requirements
- What techniques you may use to gather requirements
- How to report the requirements
- How to document the requirements
- Tracking mechanism of the requirements
- Requirement Changes – How to Process them?
- Prioritization of requirements
- How you build the traceability matrix for the requirements
- How to resolve the conflicts arise in requirements
Please note that both the scope management plan and requirements plans are subsidiary plans to the project management plan.
Summary
Firstly, plan scope management process determines the approach of how to perform all other scope management processes in the project.
There are two primary inputs for the plan scope management process. They are
- Project charter (output of develop project charter process)
- Project Management plan (output of develop project management plan process)
Plan scope management process tools and techniques are expert judgement and meetings.
There are two primary outputs of the plan scope management process. They are
- Scope Management Plan
- Requirements Management Plan
So, scope management plan helps as a blue print to drive all other scope management processes.
On the other hand, requirements management plan will tell you how to collect, record, track and manage the requirements throughout your project.
