Improving Project Scope Definition To Reduce Cost And Schedule Overruns
Defining Project Scope
Clearly defining the scope of a project upfront is critical to avoiding cost and schedule overruns down the road. An unclear or poorly defined scope often leads to scope creep, unexpected challenges, and the need for additional time and budget to complete the agreed upon deliverables. There are several key techniques project managers can utilize during the planning stages to create a well-defined scope:
Using Detailed Requirements Gathering
Conducting comprehensive requirements gathering sessions with all key stakeholders is essential to fully understanding project needs and expectations. Requirements should detail every feature, function, deliverable, integration, and capability required for an acceptable end product. Documenting clear, measurable, and testable requirements creates a solid foundation for defining project boundaries.
Creating Measurable Objectives
Project objectives should include clear problem statements detailing the specific business issues or opportunities being addressed. They should also incorporate metrics for defining success from the customer perspective. Leading measures that can forecast whether outcomes will meet stated objectives are important. These measurable goals align stakeholder understanding of the targets being managed towards.
Defining Project Boundaries
Project boundaries make explicitly clear what is included or excluded from scope. All aspects of the product, service, result, or other deliverables being created should be itemized to remove any assumptions about scope. Defining limits and restrictions upfront prevents disagreements down the road. Boundaries may include elements such as target customers, geographic regions impacted, solutions in scope, timeline constraints, support requirements, quality metrics, and security needs.
Identifying Key Deliverables
Every project results in an outcome or product that solves the problem objectives identified. Clearly detailing the tangible and measurable deliverables expected is imperative to accurately defining scope and requirements. Some standard outputs include documents, plans, designs, software systems, capabilities, events, services, or other components. Verifying deliverables often involves inspecting, demonstrating, reviewing, testing, or otherwise confirming they meet specifications.
Controlling Scope Creep
Even with robust scope definition procedures, scope creep still represents a common threat to project cost and schedule goals. This phenomenon occurs when additional requirements or tasks continue emerging from stakeholders after the project has begun. Preventing creep requires active change management processes to control alterations to agreed scope. Other tools can also improve monitoring and oversight of approved project boundaries.
Change Management Processes
Organizations should implement formal change management frameworks to evaluate, approve, or reject alterations to scope. Change control boards with cross-functional leaders review proposals and conduct impact assessments on budget, timeline, resources, and risks based on current project tolerances. This allows deliberate, evidence-based decisions about permitting changes based on transparent criteria.
Scope Verification Techniques
Conducting frequent reviews, demos, walkthroughs, or content validations against requirements provides opportunities to realign work in progress with initial scope commitments. Early detection of scope creep enables course corrections before impacting budgets or schedules. Reviews should reference baseline requirements and boundaries to evaluate any proposed additions under change control processes.
Automated Tracking Tools
Advanced analytics, project management, and requirements management technologies have robust reporting to automatically track changes. Dashboards display overall project scope health to highlight uncontrolled creep or unmanaged changes. Automation also enforces scope management policies, enhances baseline visibility, and improves monitoring.
Refining Estimates
Inadequate or unrealistic estimates of cost, budget, resource needs, or timelines also contribute to project overruns. Various forecasting and analytical techniques can improve estimate accuracy based on project scope implications.
Cost and Schedule Modeling
Specialized project modeling tools simulate scope delivery while computing optimal budgets and timelines. Sophisticated algorithms factor in resourcing options, task dependencies, uncertainties, and constraints. Models adjust estimates to identify the right funding and schedule targets as scope parameters evolve.
Historical Data Analysis
Studying comparable projects from the past can inform cost and scheduling estimates, especially for recurring project types. Metrics on actual values from previous efforts help guide estimate ranges relative to scope size. Trends aid predictions by revealing how targeted variables have historically responded to certain requirements.
Accounting for Uncertainties
Padding estimates to consider undefined or unexpected scope components is an essential technique for avoiding under-budgeting. This may incorporate buffer sizes relative to estimates, ranges versus points, acknowledging exclusions or assumptions, and conducting risk impact analysis of uncertainties on estimates.
Conclusion
Implementing robust scope definition, management, and estimation practices on the front end of projects results in better cost and schedule predictability throughout the delivery lifecycle. Investing further in clarifying detailed requirements, setting measurable goals, controlling creep with change processes, and refining estimates through modeling and historical data leverages best practices for improving project performance.
