Determining and Evaluating Your Project Scope
Project planning involves many stages. One of the most important steps in the process is determining and documenting the project scope. As a project manager or lead, your job will be to identify project goals, outline deliverables and calculate risk and costs. Often times this is no easy task and results may turn out less than desirable.
Project scope management involves the following:
A. Project Planning: To all the project leaders out there: Don’t get married to your way of doing things- because your rules and processes may not jive with your team’s outlook or perspective of a project and you may alienate potential contributors. Your team may have some invaluable insight or ideas that will help you determine how to plan a project effectively. Remaining flexible and staying open to new ideas may save you a lot of headaches and help you avoid any potential conflicts later on in the project cycle.
B. Scope Definition: Listen to your team during the planning phases. During my first years working in software sales, my manager gave me some very valuable advice: Listen 80% of the time, and talk 20% of the time. Poor communication is something we can all relate to and have experienced, in one form or another. Sadly, today, communication between a project leader and his team is limited or even worse – non-existent. Spend time with your team to discover their ideas and feedback. Your scope should be defined based on insight and goals expressed by your project’s stakeholders. Explore alternatives and complete your project scope statement.
C. Monitoring & Evaluation: Stay focused on your projects. Easier said than done, right? There are no secrets on how to plan a project perfectly, but there are definitely guidelines that one should follow to increase their chances of success. Project management can be scary especially if activities spiral out of control or intensify. Which is primarily why it is very important for team leads to remain in control and stay focused on the various tasks that need to be accomplished. There are in fact several key elements that a project team lead should always monitor and evaluate:
– Deadlines & milestones
– Scope creep
– Risks vs opportunities
– Budget and costs
– Timing and scheduling
– Organizational goal alignment
Care to share your insights? We would love to hear from you. Post a comment below.
Related blog posts:
What is Project Management? – A Video Infographic (the video version of this infographic).
What is Project Management – Infographic slide (the PowerPoint version of this infographic).
What is Requirements Management? – A Video Infographic