Introduction to scope
In agile project management scope is important to the success of a project because it improves the team’s ability to estimate time, cost, and resources. It also gives the team a baseline for performance measurement and project control (Schwalbe). This shows how scope gives the members of the team a better understanding of the requirements and deliverables for an agile project. We will address the three main parts of the scope being defining, validating, and controlling scope within this blog post.
Defining Scope
Defining scope is creating the documentation of the scope or the work that is required to complete the project.
Tools and Techniques for defining scope:
· Expert judgment
· Data Analysis
· Decision Making
· Interpersonal Skills
· Product Analysis
Outputs:
· Project Scope Statement
· Project Documents
Project scope statements typically include product scope description, product user acceptance criteria, and detailed information on all project deliverables. Other possible inclusions are project boundaries, constraints, and assumptions. These statements should improve and become clearer as the project progresses because project members get a better understanding of the end goal as the project comes to fruition. This means it is important for teams to keep their scope definitions up to date to allow for all individuals to better understand the project scope.
Validating Scope
Scope as mentioned in defining scope is something that can be unclear at the beginning of a project meaning that teams must work to create a process for scope validation that works with the customer and their needs. Validating scope is the formal acceptance of completed project deliverables (Schwalbe). This is done in combination with customers to create clear documentation of project products and procedures for evaluation of them being completed correctly and satisfactorily.
Scope Creep is a worry of projects even with strong scope validation. Scope creep is the requirements and deliverables for a project to get bigger and bigger. This means that the work for a project continues increasing and causes an excess use of time, cost, and resources for the project. This shows another reason that the verification of scope is necessary continuously throughout the life cycle of the project.
Main tools for scope validation:
· Inspection
· Decision-making Techniques
Outputs:
· Accepted Deliverables
· Change Requests
· Work Performance Information
· Project documents updates
Controlling Scope
Controlling scope is managing the changes of scope to the project while maintaining the project goals and business strategies that are already in place. Change is something that is necessary to all IT agile projects because users are not sure of what they want from a final product at the beginning of a project and developers must work to understand what these users want. This means that measures of change control should also be applied to controlling the scope to allow for professional and educated changes to the scope of a project that does not create scope creep or lead the project astray.
The main tool for scope control is data analysis, more specifically variance analysis. Variance analysis is the analysis of the difference between planned and actual performance on a project. This means if a team can only create a portion of what was originally planned, such as a website with 10 completed pages and they can only create 8 of those pages we need to analyze the difference between these and what lead to the failure to meet the planned goal.
Outputs:
· Work Performance Information
· Change Requests
· Project Management Plan Updates
· Project Documents Updates
Conclusion
A project’s scope is an integral part of the success of an agile project to effectively use time, cost, and resources. Scope gives the group members knowledge of the requirements and deliverables that are necessary for a project to be completed in a documented form with defining scope. The scope is validated by checking whether deliverables meet the requirements that have been approved through the scope. Lastly, controlling scope is used to make necessary changes to the scope throughout the project life cycle that improve the final product and keep the project goals and business strategies in effect.
This is all-important because understanding the goals for the project with requirements and deliverables are important to keep a project on track to be finished in an effective manner. With agile IT projects, it is important to keep in mind that there is a lot that can be done, but is it within the scope of the project? With this, we also must understand that inherently IT projects have changes to requirements and goals as we work on them because of many factors. We must be sure that we can make changes necessary to scope to fine-tune the project and make sure that all the developers get these updates. In all, understanding scope is very important for anyone in project management or even just working on a project at all.
References:
Schwalbe, K. (2019). Information technology project management (9th ed.). Cengage.
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