Project scope is defined as “all the work involved in creating the products of the project and the processes used to create the,” (Schwalbe, 2010, p. 178). It is one of the most difficult to aspects to define in the project, and most important at the same time. Scope management is he set of processes that helps defining and controlling project deliverables, as well what is included or not in the project scope. Those processes help all stakeholders have a common view for project requirements, deliverables, and tools used to achieve project success.
Project scope management has five main processes. Schwalbe identified them as, collecting requirements, defining scope, creating the WBS, verifying scope and controlling scope (Schwalbe, 2010, p.178,179), Khan has a different naming and order for the same processes however both serve the same purpose of managing project scope. Khan identified those processes as project initiating, scope planning, definition verification and scope change control (khan, 2006). Collecting requirements also known as project initiation involves defining and documenting functions of produced products, services or deliverables generated from the project. Its important to note that any project is initiated usually from the business in order to request a new feature, product or enhancements for existing systems, in such cases stakeholders requirements should be collected and documented, in addition to that requirements management plan along with traceability matrix are generated in this phase. Collecting requirements is the most critical and difficult step in scope management, if requirements are not collected, misunderstood or not properly documented this could lead to rework of the project and hence project failure. It’s very important in this phase to conduct project feasibility studies, such as technical, economical and financial feasibility (Khan, 2006). The following process is defining scope, in this phase or process project charter and requirements collected in previous phase are reviewed, the defined scope can be revised in later stages as in most of the IT projects, scope is not clear at the beginning of the project. Defined scope should be agreed on and signed by key stakeholders, and communicated with project team to have a better understanding for project objectives. Project scope should include description, user acceptance criteria, and detailed deliverable information (Schwalbe, 2010, p.185). Scope planning comes after the scope is defined and clear, which is also known as creating the WBS, its dictionary and scope baseline. The main objective of this phase is to create list of tasks and subtasks to be conducted by project team, this will help in ease project management. There are plenty of approaches that aid in developing the WBS, such as mind mapping, using organization’s guidelines, top-down, bottom-up and the analogy approach. Developing WBS dictionary and scope baseline are very important outputs of this phase, the dictionary include detailed task information.
Scope verification is an important phase in project scope management, khan state that this phase starts as early as its predecessors, means it’s a continuous process. It involves formally accepting project scope by stakeholders; this is done after customer review and followed by a sign-off on deliverables, and his process in important to avoid scope creep. “Earned value management is a technique frequently used for measuring progress of a project. Earned value management evaluates several indices to measure the cost and schedule progress of the project” (khan, 2006). By this technique a comparison between actual delivered work against schedules work, based on time and cost. The final process of project scope management is scope controlling, “An effective scope change control mechanism must be put in place as early as the start of the scope planning phase. It is important to classify types of scope change requests and the reason for the change” (khan, 2006). Scope should be controlled, all changes should go through predefined change control process to evaluate requested change, review, approve and then implement, impact on project cost and time should be evaluated.
The importance of scope management in IT project is clear based on the nature of those projects, usually vast number of ambiguity exist in IT projects, either due to lack of understanding of the technology and what it delivers, or due to big hopes set by business users. For that technology project scope should be managed to collect business requirements and translate them into technology tasks and subtasks, where all stakeholders have a clear understanding of project requirements and technology capabilities, to properly set expectations. Hartman & Ashrafi defined main reasons behind IT project failures or problems as lack of understanding for success criteria based on project scope, as well lack of understanding of project deliverables and evaluation process (Hartman & Ashrafi). During software development projects, changes cannot be ignored, some changes might come due to code bug, in such cases, and changes requested should be handled properly to insure project success.
Technology projects are complex, scope change during project lifecycle is inevitable, for that its important to collect requirements, communicate it with all stakeholders and form a scope baseline. Any changes after that should be controlled and managed not to lead to scope creep and project failures.
Reference:
Hartman, F, & Ashrafi, R 2002, 'Project Management in the Information Systems and Information Technologies Industries', Project Management Journal, 33, 3, p. 5, Business Source Premier, EBSCOhost, viewed 10 December 2011.
Khan, A 2006, 'Project Scope Management', Cost Engineering, 48, 6, pp. 12-16, Business Source Premier, EBSCOhost, viewed 10 December 2011.
Schwalbe, K., (2010), Information Technology Project Management (with Microsoft Project 2007 CD-ROM), 6th ed., Course Technology, 2010, ISBN 978-0-324-78692-7
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