What Is a Project Scope in Project Management?

When the project gets initiated, there may be very little and high-level project information available. For example, what is the expected outcome of the project and who are the initial stakeholders identified. The project success largely depends on how efficiently the project is scoped, monitor and control the scope of the project during the project life cycle. This brings up the question: What is a Project Scope in Project Management?

We all know that projects are progressively elaborated. Once project progresses, there would be much more detailed information available for planning the scope of the project.

What is a Project Scope in Project Management?

Project scoping is part of the planning phase. And it starts with understanding the project expected outcomes from the stakeholders identified.

It is important to understand the perspectives of all relevant stakeholders irrespective of whether those perspectives are considered in the project scope of not.

Finally shortlisting only a subset of those requirements to be part of the project scope. And clearly list out the rest of them are exclusions to the project.

What Is a Project Scope In Project Management?

PMBOK defines the project scope as follows:

The work performed to deliver a product, service, or result with the designated features and functions. The Term project scope is sometimes viewed as including product scope.

Other Project scope definitions are as follows:

• Project scope is defined as all the work that must be completed in order to deliver a product, service or a result.
• Project scope refers to all the work involved in creating the products of the project and the processes used to create them.
• A definition of the end result or mission of the project – a product, or service or a result in specific and measurable terms.
• Project scope is what you expect to deliver to the customer upon completion.

Project management plan is the measuring criteria for the project success. Meaning that, project management plan is the baseline to assess whether the project scope is fulfilled its requirements or not.

Project scope is not the sole responsibility of the project manager. Several other stakeholders would be involved in planning the project scope. However, project manager drives the scoping exercise with all the relevant stakeholders.

Why Is Project Scope Important?

In the year 1995, Chaos study stated that one of the major factors that cause software projects fail is the project scope. Project scope is one of the key ingredients that can reduce the risk of project failures.

There is a popular saying in project management related to scope.

One of the easiest things in the project management is defining the scope. And the toughest part is agreeing on the scope.

As mentioned earlier, during the planning phase, the project manager needs to work with various stakeholders to discuss on the project scope. And you see, lot of stakeholders leads to several perspectives.

One of the toughest parts of project management is managing the stakeholder expectations. Project manager must work with all the relevant stakeholders to understand their perspectives. Finally document what goes into the project, freeze and formally agree on the scope by singing off the scope document.  Usually project sponsor or any other authorized person from the senior management would be signing off the scope document.

Properly defining the project scope has the following benefits.

1. It ensures all the stakeholders to be on the same page in terms of project scope, throughout the project life cycle.
2. Since it is going to be signed off by the customer, the customer understands what is expected out of the project.
3. It stands as a reference, for any scope clarifications during the project life cycle.
4. It stays as a starting point, for any further changes to the project.
5. It helps the project team to focus their energies towards what goes into the project.
6. It helps avoiding situations such as scope creep and gold plating.

Project scope is one of the vital elements of project success. Without a proper scope definition, project manager will not be able to determine what is included in the project and what is not. It reduces the chances of project failures.

What To Include In a Project Scope?

Project In-Scope And Out of scope

One of the primary objectives of defining the project scope is to figure of out what is in scope of the project and what is going to be out of scope and exclusions to the project.

These out of scope items or exclusions may be part of another project in your organization or it is not completely not done by your organization. But for the current project it must be clearly call out to be an exclusion.

Project scope statement is the formal document used to define the scope of the project. Typically, the following sections are part of any project scope statement, but not limited to.

• Project Goals and Objectives – Understand why the project is initiated. It describes the primary objectives of the project.
• Outline Statement of Work – Outlines the work that needs to be performed to successful complete the project.
• Scope Description – Description of project scope and product scope, which primarily focus on what goes into the project, and what is not.
• Acceptance Criteria – The criteria to determine the project success. This stands as a handshake between the project organization and the customer.
• Deliverables – High level deliverables of the project.
• Key Milestones – Key milestones in the project. This may be mapped to the deliverables, if applicable.
• Constraints – Any limitations in the project, which the project is expected to adhere to.
• Assumptions – Any assumptions identified during the project scope definition needs to document and validated with relevant stakeholders.
• Risks – Any risks identified during the project scope definition.
• Sign off and approvals – This is an important section to align the approvals and signing off the document from relevant stakeholders.

The above sections are the most common in any typical project scope statement.

Project scope always needs to be objective, it should never be subjective. Indeed it is one of the best practices to ensure your project scope follows SMART (S-Specific, M-Measurable, A-Attainable, R-Realistic and T-Time bound) characteristics.

What Are The Steps To Determine The Scope Of A Project?

How to find out what all the work is required to deliver the product, service or result?

Well! You may not know this certainly in the beginning of the project. Project scoping is an iterative process.

As project progresses, you will more details about the scope coming into the project.

Project Scoping Steps

As soon as the project manager gets into the project, he/she would need to understand the project goals, high level deliverables, constraints, initial list of identified stakeholders, acceptance criteria and milestones etc. Project charter is a good starting point for the project manager to understand the high-level project scope information.

• Understand the high-level scope – Project charter is a good starting point for the project manager to understand the project goals, high level scope, deliverables, milestones, etc.
• Requirements gathering – During the collect requirements process of project scope management knowledge area, all the relevant stakeholders need to get involved in requirement workshops to understand each stakeholder perspective on the requirements and weigh each requirement in terms of its importance and priority towards the project.
• Define the scope – One of the primary steps in defining the scope is to determine what goes into the project and what are exclusions or out of scope items to the project. You would need to consider project scope and product scope both into consideration to define the scope. When defining the scope, you need to ensure that scope items follow SMART (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic and Time bound) characteristics.
• Agree, sign-off and baseline the scope – Finally once the scope is defined and documented need to get the formal sign off on the scope to baseline the scope. After baselining the scope any further changes would need to route it through change control procedures to assess the impact of the change and to decide whether to accept the change or not. Every time the change is accepted, scope would need to be re-baseline.

To summarize, you would start with high level scope available, collect the requirements from stakeholders,  define the scope with shortlisted requirements and finally baseline the scope.

What is the difference between product scope and project scope?

It is often confusing the difference between product scope and project scope.

Product Scope Vs Project Scope

In short, product scope is defined as the features and functions that characterize the product. Product scope tell us, how the product works, components of the product, its interfaces, etc. For example: home page of the portal, product exposes APIs in SOAP/REST protocol, etc.

On the other hand, project scope is about all the work that must be completed to deliver a product, service or a result with the specified features and functions. For example, when to deliver the project, what deliverables needs to be included, what is the budget, what are the project objectives, etc.

Following are the primary differences between the product scope and project scope.

What is Project Scope Management?

PMBOK specifies project scope management as a separate knowledge area. It is primary aim is to

• Plan the scope of the project, that provides us all the work that must be completed to meet the project goals and objectives.
• Monitor and control the project scope so that any changes are routed through change control board, to avoid situations such as scope creep and gold plating during the project life cycle.

Project scope management cuts across two process groups. They are Planning and Monitoring and controlling.

In the planning process group, you ensure proper scope definition for the project is created.

And in the monitoring and controlling process group, you ensure

• Team is working on only the things, that project need to deliver.
• Changes are routed through CCB (Change control board) to assess the project impacts and to decide whether the changes is acceptable or not.
• Avoid situations such as scope creep and gold plating.

What are Included in Project Scope Management?

Project scope management includes 6 processes. Among them 4 process are from planning process group and 2 processes are from monitoring and controlling process group.

Project Scope Management Processes

1. Plan Scope Management – This process tells you how the rest of the scope management processes needs to be performed. It is a blueprint of the rest of the scope management processes. It provides you the approach for the rest of the scope management processes. The primary output of this process is Scope management plan.
2. Collect Requirements – Collect requirements process is about the how collect requirements from different stakeholders. It starts with project charter and takes most of the project documents as inputs to gather project requirements. This process outputs the requirements documentation and requirements traceability matrix.
3. Define Scope – This is the main process of scope management knowledge area. Takes the requirements and other perspectives from stakeholder to define what goes in to the project and what not. Defines the boundaries of the project. The primary output of this process is the project scope statement.
4. Create WBS – Create WBS process decompose the project, into multiple manageable pieces of work called work packages. It creates hierarchy structure of project into multiple work packages. This helps the stakeholders discuss and track the work in terms of these work packages. The primary output of this process is the scope baseline. Scope baseline comprise of approved version of project scope statement, WBS, WBS dictionary. WBS dictionary contains a detailed description of each work package.
5. Validate Scope – Validate Scope is the process of formalizing acceptance of the completed project deliverables. Each deliverable is validated for conformance towards the scope. Primary output of this process is accepted deliverables.
6. Control Scope – Control Scope is the process of monitoring the status of the project and product scope and managing changes to the scope baseline. Primary output of this process is work performance information and change requests.

Scope Baseline

As you can see except validate scope and control scope processes, all other 4 processes in the project scope management knowledge are from planning processes.

Validate scope and control scope processes are from monitoring and controlling process group.

Defining Project Scope – Best Practices

Following are some of most important best practices, that one can follow to properly define the scope.

1. When defining the scope, it should follow SMART characteristics (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic and Time bound).
2. Each term in the scope should be clearly explained with Glossary, so that all stakeholders reading the document will have a common understanding of that term.
3. A RACI matrix will help to clarify, to make everyone understand, who is responsible for what. For example, a specific part of the functionality is expected to carry by a third party (3PP) vendor.
4. Wherever applicable, try to explain with UML or other diagrams to explain the architectures and other building blocks for easy understanding. For example, in an IT software development project, it is a good practice to create the screen look and feel first and document in the scope, so that everyone understands how the end product will look like.
5. Once the scope is defined and agreed with stakeholders, it is very important to get the sign off on the project scope document. This way, you can ensure, both the parties are agreeing formally on to the project scope statement.
6. Every time there is a change, route it through CCB (Change control board) to assess the impact and re-baseline the scope, where applicable.

Conclusion:

• Project Scope is defined as all the work that must be completed to deliver a product, service or a result with the designated features and functions. Product scope purely defines the product specifications.
• Defining the project scope is a very critical element for the project success. It avoids the common project problems such as scope creep and gold plating.
• Project scoping includes understanding the project goals and objective, collecting requirements, documenting them, and agreeing and signing off the project scope. Approved project scope is called as baseline.
• Project scope baseline includes project scope statement, WBS and WBS Dictionary. Any changes to the scope need to be routed through CCB (change control board) and re-baseline the scope, if the changes are accepted by the CCB.
• Project scope statement is the formal document to record the project scope.
• Project scope management is a knowledge area in PMBOK. It provides the processes to dealt with the scope management processes in the project. These are 4 processes that belongs to planning process group and 2 process from monitoring and controlling. They are:
  • Planning process group processes are
    • Plan scope management
    • Collect requirements
    • Define Scope
    • Create WBS
  • Monitoring and controlling processes are
    • Validate scope
    • Control scope