Everything we do in a project starts here with the scope. It can be considered t

Question

Everything we do in a project starts here with the scope. It can be considered the most important stage of the game.

Thus, I can’t overemphasize its importance. In the computing world, there is an acronym known as GIGO, which stands for “garbage in, garbage out.” Essentially, this denotes that your finished product is only as good as the inputs with which you started. The same holds true for project management – if your project scope is flawed (i.e., not well defined), so will be your project deliverable in many cases. With that setting the stage, let’s discuss project scoping and its importance.

Explanation / Answer

Project Scope Importance:
who has ever completed a project will surely have tales of how scope changes have had a negative overall effect.
Scope change is bound to happen and is expected in most cases, but the goal is to keep your scope as focused as possible in hopes of creating as straight of a line
to you and your client's goal as possible. Thomas Cutting of The Project Management Hut had this
example: "My father is semi-retired, which means he would rather be working than sitting around. He now drives a tractor for a potato farm in western New York State.
In order to plow a straight line he focuses on a point at the far end of the field and aims for it. One time he finished a row and found that the point he had picked
was the head of a duck that was walking back and forth along the edge of the field. Needless to say, that row was not even close to straight.
If you allow your scope to waddle back and forth your project will experience similar consequences." (17) If a projects scope is clearly identified and properly
associated to the resources, time and budget throughout the project lifespan the likelihood for success is greatly improved. Allowing your scope to move around
like a ducks head may get you to your goal eventually, but not very efficiently. Going deeper reveals that scoping can be broken down to 5 step by step components
to guide you through the process smoothly. These components are project initiation, scope planning, scope definition, scope verification, and scope change control.

Project Initiation:

Projects are initiated when a business need arises. This may mean a consulting company is asked by a customer to redesign their website or possibly the consulting company itself needs to update its own intranet. Whenever a need appears project initiation is a way to evaluate that need and come up with an acceptable solution.

Scope Planning

This stage of the scoping process is all about developing an initial Work Breakdown Structure (WBS). A WBS is a results-oriented family tree that captures all the potential work to be done in the project in an organized way. It is often portrayed graphically as a hierarchical tree; however, it can also be a list of element categories and tasks. Large complex projects are more easily understood by breaking them into progressively smaller pieces until they are a collection of defined "work packages" that may include a number of tasks. A $1,000,000,000 project is simply a lot of $50,000 projects joined together (2). The WBS is used to provide the framework for organizing and managing the work in smaller deliverables. The summary of the WBS at this stage of the project identifies the key deliverables that the project should provide. Assigning deliverables allows the team to focus on each smaller piece and add details to it where they see fit. Without a breakdown the project would appear too broad and lack the attention to detail of a more defined project.

Scope Definition

At this point most of the pieces of the project have been put into place: 1) A project manager has been assigned 2) team formed 3) the project has been deemed feasible 4) summary of the WBS has been formed 5) the budget and schedule have been outlined. Now it's time to add details to the project as a whole. The WBS will be expanded to include exactly the type of work that will be done, detail is very important here. This involves working closely with the client and getting what is wanted out of the project into the WBS (17). For example if the customer and consulting firm are discussing ways to change or improve the customer's website, all the conclusions will be taken down here and a detailed final design will be the result. Everything from the colors of the front page to what emotional reaction the customer wants its visitors to get from the site will be defined in this stage. By this phase actual work on the project has begun.

Scope Verification

Scope verification by nature is interwoven with the definition and planning phases. It also provides an opportunity for the client to come back after some of the initial work has been done and verify that the work is deemed acceptable. Since the different components of scope management are aimed at the same goal of providing a uniform scope throughout the project all of them tend to overlap at times but this is a natural process. Because of this it's a possibility to see scope verification many times during the process. If the client prefers their website to be a different color scheme or function differently now is the time to work with the consultant on these changes. The purpose in mind is to keep both parties goals as close to the uniform straight line as possible. This phase is designed to strengthen and reinforce the initial scope definition through feedback.

Scope Change Control

During any project, scope change is inevitable as two or more different parties work towards a goal that satisfies everyone. Here the concept of scope creep is introduced, which applies to any unauthorized changes to the project scope. Because of the potentially disastrous consequences of scope change whether wanted or unwanted, testing is vital at this point of the process. If during testing changes are needed there must be documentation. A change control is the type of formal documentation that provides official statements about any changes in project scope to guide the process as smoothly as possible. A scope change control should be put in place as early as possible to classify the types of requests that take place during the project. Changes in scope can have a great effect on every element of the process with the most important being cost. Defining these changes in an orderly fashion will help keep the client involved and ultimately affect the schedule, cost, and quality of the finished product.

Scope Creep

Throughout the process of determining scope and managing a project one of your biggest enemies will be scope creep. Allowing your scope to wander too much can wreak havoc on your budget, time deadline and just about any aspect of a project that you can imagine. "Scope creep is a natural part of every project", says Douglas Brindley, senior vice president of consulting firm Software Productivity Research (SPR). According to SPR, requirements in an internal development project grow each month by about 2% of the original list. But as time passes, accommodating requests becomes more expensive, with new requirements at the coding or testing stages costing an order of magnitude more than those added during the first three months (19). "The projects that are successful are the ones that create a tight process to manage creep from the beginning. Knowing what a feature will cost before it's approved is key" adds Brindley (19). Clearly one the most damaging aspects of scope creep is increasing project cost. Not only does adding more features drain the project budget, but adding the time they require also pushes back completion dates causing a loss to the potential profits that would have been realized with an on time finish date. Scope creep can also create a larger and more complex end result that costs more to maintain in the end, thus cutting into the profits that a newer more efficient system was supposed to realize. So what causes scope creep and how can those problems be fixed? A few reasons that allow scope creep to become an issue

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