Scope Management is Project Management
Scope management is essential for project managers because it is the process that helps you control what work is to be done and how it will be done. It’s important because staying in control of scope helps you save time later. When everyone understands what the project is doing, you avoid miscommunication, and that helps prevent unnecessary change requests and conflicts later on.
Even when you invest time and energy into confirming the scope, you’ll still find that it changes as the project progresses, and that is expected. A robust approach to managing scope helps make sure everyone’s views are heard early enough for their ideas to make it into the scope document, so you can focus on the significant change requests.
The scope management process lets you adapt to those changes in a controlled way, so you always have an unrestricted view of what the project is delivering. The scope management plan should include the detailed process of scope determination, its management, and control. This needs to be planned in advance. The project manager must seek formal approval on a well-defined and clearly articulated scope. To identify scope, we must gather requirements from all stakeholders. Large projects require more time, effort, and resources to gather requirements, and thus defining scope is important. Scope definition helps us to make sure we are doing all the work included in the scope management plan. We must make changes in scope into consideration across all the areas of project management such as time, cost, risk, quality, resources, and customer satisfaction. It requires an integrated change management process to approve changes to the scope of a project. It requires continuous monitoring of scope to determine what is and is not included in the project.
Product Scope vs Project Scope
Product Scope is nothing but “What customer wants?” Product scope could be part of the requirements gathering of your project.
An example of product scope would be: On a project to build a new software application, the product scope is “a new application that fulfills the requirements of our internal and external customers.” To determine if the project successfully achieved the product scope, we compare the resulting application to the requirements document and the project scope statement for the project.
The Project scope is the work the project will need to deliver the product with the desired functionalities. This work includes planning, coordination, and management activities (such as meetings and reports) that ensure it achieves the product scope. These efforts are a part of the project management plan and are further a part of the scope management plan. At the end of the project or the phase, we compare the completed work against the scope baseline in the project management plan to determine if the scope has been successfully reached.
Scope Creep-The Great Evil and Ways to Combat it
You were planning to introduce one additional feature for the next major release, but suddenly, somehow, your team is working on five features all at once — all while under the pressure of meeting the original release date. How did this happen? Simple: The process suffered a bit of scope creep. Solution? That’s also simple: “Let’s just stop working on those extra features that weren’t part of our original plan.”
But it rarely is that simple. That’s why it’s called scope creep. Just one little extra bit of work here, a tiny new commitment there, an innocent promise to add a few more to that part of the product… and suddenly you’re short on resources, your development team is exhausted, and you’re in danger of missing an important deadline.
How can you keep this from happening? How can you prevent these little steps in the wrong direction from adding up to a situation that overwhelms your team and slows your product’s progress?
1. Share your product roadmap
If you build it correctly, your product roadmap will reflect both your strategic blueprint for the product and the realities your team will work on in terms of resource, budget, and time constraints. When everyone on your cross-functional team can see this high-level view of your product’s plans, priorities, and the strategic thinking behind it all, they will be more likely to understand how a request for what might seem to be a small additional bit of functionality will, in reality, have to disrupt some other part of the product’s progress. So, the more often you refer to and share your product roadmap with your organization, the clearer it will be to everyone that your finite resources for this project can’t afford scope creep.
2. Determine exactly what will make up scope creep on your plan.
There are obvious, easy-to-spot types of scope creep. One idea leads to another, and another, and another. You can’t do them all, not in the time you have or with the number of resources on your team. That’s scope creep everyone understands (even though some people will still try to persuade you to engage in it.) But then there are subtler forms of scope creep. One of the sneakiest ways that scope creep can slip into your product development process is when it comes disguised as something else, like “improving or updating” something you had already agreed upon. So, you’ve got to define for your team exactly what every step of your plan includes. Anything outside or besides that original plan? You can treat it as a change request and review it. But unless and until you give it the green light, its scope creep.
3. Build “scope monitoring” into your routine.
One of the easiest ways to fall victim to scope creep is by losing sight of your original strategic plan and the priorities you’ve set for your product. So refer regularly to your strategic plan. Pop open your product roadmap often and share it with your team, so you can all stay connected to your original strategic thinking and regularly review the day-to-day work you’re all engaged in.
4. Discourage your developers from over-delivering.
We know: This sounds awful. But as a product manager, one thing you should always remember is that your developers will often care deeply about the work they’re doing and will want it to be perfect. And in an ideal world — a world without budgets, or deadlines, or customers eagerly waiting for a finished product they can buy — you’d want your dev team building to perfection. Unfortunately, though, you are always going to be working against the clock (and the accounting team), so you’ll need your developers to stop short of perfection and do the greatest work they can in the time allotted to them. As difficult as it might sound, sometimes, your product will need to be only as good as your team can make it before launch.
5. Make it easy to suggest and track great ideas for later.
One last suggestion for avoiding scope creep is to encourage your team to contribute their product ideas and requests, and to make it as easy as you can for them to do so. Then make a practice of periodically reviewing these ideas with your team, vetting and scoring them according to your key metrics, and, when it makes sense, updating your product roadmap to accommodate strategically viable items. When you communicate to your executive stakeholders and the other teams across your company that you are open to product suggestions, but that those suggestions will have to wait their turn to get their fair hearings, you will reinforce to everyone in the organization your commitment to adhering to your product’s existing plan.
That simple statement, along with the other tips here, can help you grow a company culture that understands the dangers of scope creep and actively discourages everyone from engaging in it.
