What is a scope statement in project management? Project scope statement is a document that describes the scope of the project. Project Scope Statement includes all the project work that you and your team is going to do, to fulfill the project requirements and the stakeholder needs.
What is a Scope Statement in project management?
Project Scope statement is the primary output of Define Scope process in the project scope management knowledge area of PMBOK.
Proper project scoping is one of most critical factors for the project success.
Project scope is about clarifying what goes into the project from what is “not” going to be part of the project. Typically, what is not going to be part of the project is called out as exclusions or out of scope items to the project.
What is a Scope in Project Management?
Scope of a project is defined as all the work that must be completed, to deliver a product, service, or result.
Developing the project scope is a part of the project planning activity.
Project scope is the process of determining and documenting the
- Project goals and objectives
- Product features and functions (or a service/result)
- What tasks make up the project to completion
- What are project deliverables
- Schedules and milestones
- Estimates (effort and cost)
What is a Scope in Project Management
Project scope statement is the document that describe the scope of a project. We will see more on the project scope statement in a while.
Common Project Scope Issues
At times, it is challenging to develop project scope in the fair level of detail. Sometimes, though the stakeholders understand the high level project scope, they ignore or overlook to document the project scope at the reasonable level of granularity.
Following are some of the common challenges we face when the project is running into the scoping issues.
- Do not know where to start – Everybody was good at their jobs, but no one knew how and where to start.
- Do not know where to end – Not been able to conclude, whether we are done with the project scoping exercise or not. Worst part of this is, sometimes we look for sponsor’s opinion to conclude whether the project is done or not.
- Every time we think we are done with project scope, we see changes. And the worst part is that, some of the stakeholders get into the discussions to conclude that these are not changes.
What is a Scope Statement in Project Management?
A project scope statement is a detailed document describing the entire scope of the project, including project scope, product scope, deliverables, assumptions, and constraints.
Requirements will be identified during the collect requirements process. However, all these requirements may not be included in the project. The define scope process performs a detailed study on the requirements documentation and find out the final list of requirements that must be included in the scope statement.
And with the help of the finalized requirements, it then develops the detailed description of project scope and product (or service/result) scope.
Project scope statement is usually prepared in an iterative manner. Essentially during project initiation, we understand the high level deliverables expected from the project, assumptions and any constraints identified through project charter. Hence project charter would be the starting point for define scope process to output the project scope statement.
As we know the projects are progressively elaborated, we get more detailed view on the deliverables, assumptions, constraints, and risks during planning.
So during planning, the project scope document will capture more detailed level of information related to the project and product scope, assumptions, constraints, and risks.
In the iterative project life cycle, a high level vision for the entire project is fist developed. Then a detailed scope is developed for each iteration. Meaning that, when the current iteration progresses, the project scope statement for the next iteration will kick start.
Benefits of Scope Statement in Project Management
In a nut shell, project scope statement is all about fixing and documenting the boundaries of the project. Project scope is nothing but, getting to know all the project work that you are going to do, even before you start the project. Following are some of the most important benefits of project scope.
Project scope statement will
- Act as a single point of reference for all the stakeholders, whenever there is a gap in the project scope.
- Ensure all stakeholders understands, what tasks are involved and what to deliver
- Helps the project team to focus on project objectives
- Ensures project team to focus on only in scoped activities, by clearly specifying what is out of scope for the project.
- Helps the project manager and project team to prevent situations such as scope creep and gold plating.
How to Write a Project Scope Statement?
Developing the scope of the project is not a one man’s job. It requires the project manager to collaborate with other stakeholders including the project team, sponsor, customer side stakeholders, etc…
Many a times, JAD (Joint Application Design) workshops are used to brainstorm on the scope of the project and create the project scope statement. The JAD workshop will have a neutral facilitator, who will conduct the workshop with the help of project manager and other stakeholders.
Project scope development JAD workshop includes the discussions and deliverables that are listed below, but not limited to.
- Business/Project Objectives – A business objective is achieved by executing one more projects. Objectives always must be SMART (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant and Time bounded).
- Project Constraints – Project constraints are limitations in the project, that may limit the options of the project team or limit the solution produced by the project. Project charter is the best place to start understanding the project constraints, when developing project scope.
- Critical Success Factors – The solution factored for the project, must satisfy these critical success factors. In a way, you can see them as high level requirements of the project that must be accomplished, for a successful project.
- Project Assumptions – Many a times, we see the gaps in understanding some of the factors in the project. Project team will make certain decisions, which they think are reasonably true, though there may be a chance of these factors becoming not true. These are called project assumptions. Due to this uncertainty nature, by default all project assumptions add up risks to the project.
- Proposed Solution for Product, Service, or Result – This describe the approach the project team taking to achieve the project objectives.
How to Define the Scope of a Project?
PMBOK describe the define scope process of project scope management knowledge area to chart the project scope in to the project scope statement document.
When to Perform Define Scope Process
When to perform define scope process? This determines the inputs to the define scope process.
When to Define Project Scope?
Project charter is an important input to this process. Project charter already contains the high level scope and the deliverable agreed during the initial phases 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 define scope process.
Stakeholder Register contains the list of stakeholders that you identify when preparing the charter. So again stakeholder register will help to plan the stakeholder meetings to discuss and agree on the scope.
Plan scope management process outputs the scope management plan, which tells you the approach of how to perform the rest of the scope management processes.
Requirements document is the primary input to collect requirements process, as this provides a clear view what work you must do as part of the project to fulfill the project needs. As we have seen, collect requirements process will produce the requirements documentation.
Define Scope Process
Once we collect the requirements, you must work with the team to understand what work you require to fulfill the requirements.
There are two outputs of define scope process. They are project scope statement and project document updates.
As we have seen earlier, the primary inputs of define scope process are the outputs of develop project charter, plan scope management and collect requirements processes.
Define Scope Process ITTOs
DEFINE SCOPE PROCESS INPUTS
- 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 define scope process.
- Project Management Plan contains all subsidiary plans. All of these plans would be of help to define the scope. Especially scope management plan tells you how to perform the rest of the scope management processes. In this case you would get to know how to perform define scope process in your project.
- Project Documents
- Requirements Documentation helps you with the list of requirements, so that project can decide which requirements are considered in the scope.
- Assumption Log contains all the assumptions identified in the project.
- Risk register contains the response strategies, that may impact the project scope such as reducing or increasing the scope, to mitigate the risk.
- Enterprise environmental factors such as the organizational culture, infrastructure may impact the define scope process.
- Organizational process assets might have historical templates of project scope statements from historic projects, which may be of help instead of starting everything from scratch.
DEFINE SCOPE PROCESS TOOLS & TECHNIQUES
- Expert Judgement – Taking help from experts, who dealt with the similar process of creating the project scope statements in other projects.
- Alternative Analysis – Most of the times, you will have multiple alternative ways of doing a work. So, think about all the alternate ways of doing the work. And finally select the optimal way based on the parameters and justification of best possible alternative.
- Multi Criteria Decision making is a techniques that uses decision matrix to refine the project and product scope.
- Facilitated Workshops – It is important to have Facilitated workshops with the stakeholders to understand the stakeholder needs and set and define the scope objectively instead of subjectively. Meaning that your project goals should be measurable.
- Product Analysis – Product Analysis is about what product requires. Project scope should contain what the product needs are, so that, you don’t miss out any of the product requirements from the project scope.
DEFINE SCOPE PROCESS OUTPUTS
The plan scope management process produces two outputs.
- Project Scope Statement – Project scope statement tells you all the work that must be done, to successfully complete the project.
- Update to Project Documents – During define scope process, if you identify any scope changes then you update the relevant project documents such as requirements, assumptions and stakeholders.
Project Scope Statement Example
Let us take a software project scope example to prepare the project scope statement. In a very high level, the scope we are considering as an example is that, we are intend to develop a software to build a website portal. Once the software development is completed, this new software application is going to replace the existing legacy portal.
Following is the software project scope example. Please note that this is a very simplified version of project scope document, for your better understanding.
Simple Project Scope Statement Example Template for Website Software Project
Simple Project Scope Statement Template
Project scope statement is usually prepared as a word document. In small to less complicated projects, I have seen developing the project scope using the excel. Below is a simple project scope statement template for your reference.
Project Scope Statement Example
What is included in a project scope statement Template?
A project scope statement typically includes the following:
- Project Objectives or purpose of the project – Background about the project
- Product Scope – Product scope contains the features and needs of the product.
- Project Scope Description (In Scope and Out of Scope) – Project scope in addition to the product scope. All scope items must be measurable. Also list out the out of scope items, so that stakeholders are clear with these items.
- Project Scope Deliverables – Describes list of deliverables of a project. If the project executes in a staggered way then, list out the deliverables of the project for each iteration/phase.
- Acceptance criteria – Acceptance criteria agreed with the stakeholders. This would be a collection of measurable KPIs. The way that you measure these KPIs, typically the formulas are also listed here, so that all the stakeholders are on same page in terms of how to measure them.
- Project Constraints – Limitations of the project, you must consider.
- Project Assumptions – Any assumptions considered during the scope definitions. Stakeholders must validate the assumptions to make them concrete statement, so that no surprises occur later in the project.
Project Scope Statement Vs Requirements Document
Although it is confusing, Project scope statement and the requirements documentation are two different documents with different purposes.
Primarily requirements document captures your project requirements. These are typically product requirements, stakeholder needs and organization goals for the project.
On the other hand, project scope statement contains a detailed description of the project scope (finalized requirements) along with project deliverables, assumptions, constraints. In other words, scope defines the boundaries of your project, what is in scope and what is not.
Conclusion
What is a scope statement in project management? We have learned the definition of scope statement and what it typical includes.
Project Scope statement is the primary output of define scope process in project scope management knowledge area.
Primary inputs to Define scope process are project charter, scope management plan and the requirements documentation.
Requirements documentation is an input to define scope process to conduct a detailed study to understand the finalized requirements to include in the project scope.
Tools and techniques used in define scope process are facilitated workshops, product analysis, alternative generation, and expert analytics.
Project scope statement typically contains a detailed description of the project scope, out of scope items, deliverables, acceptance criteria, constraints, and assumptions.
