Information Technology Project Management – Week #4 Lecture

What is Project Scope Management?

● Scope refers to what should be included in a project. The scope also refers to what should be excluded from a project. For example, a customer wants a yellow rose bush, in a wooden pot, that sits on a wrought iron stand. An antique wrought iron stand is excluded from the scope. The scope is typically defined in a business case, or the project charter. The scope is usually defined in terms of, descriptions of deliverables, functionality, data flow, and in technical diagrams.

● A deliverable is a product produced as part of a project. Deliverables can be hardware, software, or documentation, such as project artifacts, and training manuals.

● Project scope management consists of the activities concerned with identifying and controlling what is or is not included in a project

Project Scope Management Processes

● Planning scope is deciding on how the project’s scope and requirements will be overseen.

● Requirements collection is documenting the descriptions of the features and functions of the products produced during the project

● Defining scope is creating a scope statement by reviewing the business case, project charter, and requirements documents

● Creating the Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) is planning tasks to complete towards delivery of each major project deliverable, by splitting the tasks into manageable tasks and subtasks

● Validating scope is formalizing acceptance of the project deliverables by the customer validating that the product contains all features specified in the requirements documentation.

● Controlling scope is documenting and overseeing changes to project scope throughout the life of the project. The aim is for scope changes not to increase the project cost or schedule.

Figure 1 Project Scope Management Summary (Schwalbe, 2015)

Planning Scope Management

● The scope management plan and the requirements management plan are produced by the project team using expert judgment and through meetings.

● The scope management plan is part of the project management plan

Scope Management Plan Contents

The scope management plans contain procedures for how to prepare a project scope statement, how to create a WBS, how to maintain and approve a WBS, how to obtain formal acceptance of completed deliverables, and how to control change requests.

Requirements Management Plan

● The PMBOK® Guide, Fifth Edition, describes requirements as “conditions or capabilities that must be met by the project or present in the product, service, or result to satisfy an agreement or other formally imposed specification (Project Management Institute, 2013).”

● Requirements describe the features of the final product or service of the project and what it should do.

● The requirements management plan describes how project requirements will be analyzed, documented, and managed

Collecting Requirements

● For some IT projects, requirements are used throughout the project development to ensure that the project focus remains on track. The requirements elicitation is documenting requirements from the customer or users. Requirements analysis is analyzing the systems and software development needed to fulfill the requirements. Requirements specification is translating the functional requirements gathered during requirement elicitation into system specifications. Requirements validation is the customer or users validating that all requirements initially requested are in the final product.

● It is important to use an iterative approach to defining requirements since they are often unclear early in a project. The cost to correct and issue discovered during design is much less than if the defect was discovered post product release. See Figure 2.

Figure 2 Relative Cost to Correct a Software Requirement Defect (Schwalbe, 2015)

Methods for Collecting Requirements

● Interviewing

● Focus groups and facilitated workshops

● Using group creativity and decision-making techniques

● Questionnaires and surveys

● Observation

● Prototyping

● Benchmarking, or generating ideas by comparing specific project practices or product characteristics to those of other projects or products inside or outside the performing organization, can also be used to collect requirements

Requirements Traceability Matrix

● A requirements traceability matrix (RTM) is a table that lists the functional requirements, corresponding system specifications, and the test cases that correspond to the functional requirements and system specifications

Defining Scope

● “Project scope statements should include at least a product scope description, product user acceptance criteria, and detailed information on all project deliverables. It is also helpful to document other scope-related information, such as the project boundaries, constraints, and assumptions. The project scope statement should also reference supporting documents, such as product specifications

● As time progresses, the scope of a project should become more clear and specific (Schwalbe, 2015).”

Table 1 Sample Project Charter (partial) (Schwalbe, 2015)

Table 2 Further Defining Project Scope (Schwalbe, 2015)

Creating the Work Breakdown Structure (WBS)

● A WBS is a deliverable-oriented document that contains groupings of the work involved in a project that covers the total scope of the project

● WBS is a fundamental document that facilitates planning and managing project schedules, resources, costs, and changes

● Decomposition is splitting tasks involved in producing project deliverables into smaller pieces

● A work package is a task at the lowest level of the WBS

● The scope baseline includes the approved project scope statement and its associated WBS and WBS dictionary

Figure 3 Sample Intranet WBS Organized by Product (Schwalbe, 2015)

Figure 4 Sample Intranet WBS Organized by Phase (Schwalbe, 2015)

Figure 5Intranet WBS and Gantt Chart in Microsoft Project (Schwalbe, 2015)

Figure 6 Intranet Gantt Chart Organized by Project Management Process Groups (Schwalbe, 2015)

Validating Scope

● “It is very difficult to create a good scope statement and WBS for a project

● It is even more difficult to verify project scope and minimize scope changes

● Scope validation involves formal acceptance of the completed project deliverables

● Acceptance is often achieved by a customer inspection and then sign-off on key deliverables (Schwalbe, 2015)”

Controlling Scope

● “Scope control involves controlling changes to the project scope

o Goals of scope control are to influence the factors that cause scope changes

o Assure changes are processed according to procedures developed as part of integrated change control, and manage changes when they occur

● Variance is the difference between planned and actual performance (Schwalbe, 2015)”

References

Project Management Institute. (2013). A guide to the project management body of knowledge: (PMBOK® guide). Newtown Square, Pa.: Project management institute.

Schwalbe, K. (2015). Information technology project management. Cengage Learning.