Define & Refine

Importance of Project Scope Management

Are you a project manager facing a failing streak? Are you having trouble in understanding the objectives and requirements of your project? You might want to consider focusing more on your Projects’ Scope Management aspect. Project Scope Management is the process of planning, defining, verifying, and controlling the requirements in any project. Making sure you have the complete requirements is the utmost consideration before starting any other process in a project. “The 1995 Chaos survey of IT executive managers listed the Top 10 causes for project termination to be:
1. Incomplete requirements (13.1 percent)…
2. Lack of user involvement (12.4 percent)…
3. Lack of resources (10.6 percent)…
4. Unrealistic expectations (9.9 percent)…
5. Lack of executive support (9.3 percent)…
6. Changing requirements (8.7 percent)…
7. Lack of planning (8.1 percent)…
8. Absence of need (7.5 percent)…
9. Lack of IT management (6.2 percent)…
10. Technology illiteracy (4.3 percent)” (Boehm, 2000)

The above statistics not only emphasize the importance of having complete requirements (13.1%), but, furthermore, highlight the necessity for scope management. Scope Management represents 31.7% of the causes for project termination (failure in this case) as portrayed above: incomplete requirements (13.1%) + unrealistic expectations (9.9 %) + changing requirements (8.7 %).

Stakeholders or project owners sometimes have unrealistic expectations. These expectations cannot surface unless scope definition is refined. Having unclear or misunderstood scope/objectives was listed as the number one risk in another survey performed by Addison and Vallabh: “All respondents indicated that the risk of unclear or misunderstood scope/objectives was very important… Aggregating the responses resulted in the following ranking of the listed risks: (in order of importance): — Unclear or misunderstood scope/objectives (Risk 1)” (Addison & Vallabh, 2002). Below is a chart showing the full results.




Fig. 1: IT Projects’ Risk Factors’ Importance Percentage as per the survey performed by Addison & Vallabh [2002]


While changing requirements is managed by the Control Management Plan, Scope Management allows the project manager to identify and report the effects of such a possible scope change avoiding by which any scope creep.
Marwan Abi Antoun in a recent research paper; while detailing his experience in an IT project which he referred to as “project BLUE”; mentioned what he considered as a “serious process mistake” referring to project scope creep which “introduced delays at various points” of the project. (Abi-Antoun, 2007)
Avoiding such scope creeps was cited in Addison and Vallabh’s paper quoting Keil et al. [1998]: “to avoid the problem of scope creep, project managers should inform users of the impact of scope changes in terms of project cost and schedule.” (Addison & Vallabh, 2002) In this sense, Scope Management has direct effect on the cost and schedule of a project which are considered two of three (third being quality) defining elements for project success.

Moreover, focusing on Project Scope Management permits the project manager to have a better understanding of what to expect through initial estimations he/she should make related to an original Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) devised as part of this management plan. “The risk of ‘unclear or misunderstood scope/objectives’ also occurs less frequently when the project is broken down into controllable portions.” (Addison & Vallabh, 2002) Breaking down the project along with their initial estimations, help further in identifying risks associated with any of the project aspects. These estimations are considered vital for scope verification. Stakeholders need to provide the project manager with enough input allowing him/her to verify the accuracy level of both his/her estimations and scope definition (along with many other aspects).

Project Scope Management’s real effect on project success or failure is mainly related to the question of understanding what problem or need is this project solving/fulfilling in addition to managing and controlling any possible changes that might be faced throughout the project processes. Appreciating the value of Project Scope Management will always pay-off favoring project success.

References:

Abi-Antoun, Marwan (October 21–25, 2007) Making Frameworks Work: a Project Retrospective [Research Paper] Available from: ACM Digital Library - ACM 978-1-59593-865-7/07/0010


Boehm, Barry (2001) Software Management: Project Termination Doesn’t Equal Project Failure [Article] Available from: IEEE Xplore and www.cs.unc.edu/~welch/class/comp145/media/docs/Boehm_Term_NE_Fail.pdf


Tom Addison and Seema Vallabh (2002) Controlling Software Project Risks – an Empirical Study of Methods used by Experienced Project Managers [Paper] Available from: ACM Digital Library.