Scope

This first item on the Project Manager's agenda when commencing a project is usually to define the scope.  In many corporations either a Project Charter or a PID is created and approved before the project is authorised.  This single document contains the scope of the project and the business justification.  Importantly, this document authorises the project to go ahead and confirms the name of the Project Manager.

The scope document is often referred to throughout the life cycle of the project and is used by all stakeholders to confirm the direction of the project.  Where the Initiation document provides an outline of the scope, a further breakdown and detail must be confirmed.

My current project is having difficulty defining the scope.  Some of this is due to budget reasons and some of it is down to communication issues.  My current client is a Japanese bank.  The communication issue is not just the language, but the culture.  I have previously written an article relating to the culture of a Japanese corporation.

Gold Plating

Gold plating is the addition of features in a project that were not requested within the Project Scope. Project Scope Creep comes from the customer side, where as Gold Plating is introduced by the Project Team.  Gold plating can be a good or a bad thing for a project, as the customer may or may not accept the change. 

If the customer accepts the change, all is good, except that this may have cost the project some time or money. If the customer does not accept the Gold Plating, then remediation work may have to take place to back out the changes to the original scope, which will potentially cost both time and money.

Scope Creep

The first and most important part of any project is the Scope.  The scope must be defined, signed off and locked away and a change management process must be followed to make any changes. 

Scope Creep is one of the projects worst enemies and is something that all Project Managers work to avoid.  If a change is to be made, then all the stakeholders must understand the impact to the project in terms of Risk and Cost in terms of financial or schedule. 

A change to the project should be formal and may result in additional risks to the project, for example some of the resources may not be available for an extended period, or the change may impact other projects within the organisation. 

There are several causes of Scope Creep, but the most common cause is that the requirements were poorly defined.  This can be combated by spending a little more time on the PID and making sure that all the users and stakeholders are involved in this early stage within the project.  A PID is the Project Initiation Document, which is a Prince2 term and is created to "...define the project’s scope and direction and use it as the basis for its authorisation, management and assessing its success.  The document details all the foreseeable areas of the project, such as goals, scope, risks, controls and budget.".  I will discuss the PID in a further article. 

To manage the project scope, you need to make sure you are aware of the end game.  You need to know the purpose of the project and how are you going to get there?  For this the fundamental rule for my projects is to get the project defined, break it into steps and make sure these are delivered in the correct order.  I always add a sentence to my Project Definition to the effect that says "Anything that is not disclosed within this Project Definition and PID, is outside of the scope of this project.".  This tells the stakeholders within the project, that if is not in the document, it is not going to be delivered. 

In summary, make sure you have the project scope written down and signed off.  When changes to the scope arise, make sure a project change document is created and authorised by the stakeholders, before you consider changing the scope.  This change of scope will require the Project Change Document as well as a budget review and a Project Plan review.  In larger organisations the Programme Manager will need to be involved as this change in a single project may impact other projects in their portfolio. 

Beware of Project Scope Creep !