Scope (project management)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Scope (products) of a project is the sum total of all projects products and their requirements or features.
Sometimes scope is used to mean the totality of work needed to complete a project.
In traditional project management, the tools to describe a project's scope (product) are the product breakdown structure and product descriptions. The primary tool to describe a project's scope (work) is the work breakdown structure.
Extreme project management advocates the use of user stories, feature lists and feature cards to describe a project's scope (product-deliverable).
If requirements are not completely defined and described and if there is no effective change control in a project, scope or requirement creep may ensue.
Scope creep management is significant in business all around the world, as every IT project that a company will set out on has a project scope, as previously mentioned. Since IT projects are expected to have strict deadlines with time restraints, the effect of a change in the scope can ultimately affect the success of the IT project. Scope creep sometimes causes cost overrun.
Scope creep is a term which refers to the creeping forward of the scope of an IT project, which may include and introduce more requirements that may not have been a part of the initial planning of the project, while nevertheless remaining on schedule with reference to time for delivery and completion. There are two distinct ways to separate scope creep management, the first is business scope creep, and the second is called features (also technology) scope creep. The type of scope creep management is always dependent upon on the people who create the changes.
Business scope creep management is where decisions that are made with reference to an IT project are designed to solve or meet the requirements and needs of the business. Business scope creep changes may be a result of poor analysis of the requirements of the company early in development, or in the failure to include the users of the project until the later stage of the systems development life cycle.
Scope management plan is one of the major Scope communication documents. The Project Scope Management Plan documents how the project scope will be defined, managed, controlled, verified and communicated to the project team and stakeholders/customers. It also includes all work required to complete the project. The documents are used to control what is in and out of scope of the project by the use of a Change Management system. Items deemed out of scope go directly through the change control process and are not automatically added to the project work items. The Project Scope Management plan is included in as one of the sections in the overall Project Management plan. It can be very detailed and formal or loosely framed and informal depending on the communication needs of the project.
Features (Technology) scope creep management is where the scope creep is developed by technologists, for customer pleasing or technical gold-plating purposes where features are added to the IT project by the technologists causing the scope creep. Customer-pleasing scope creep results from an organization or individual whose ultimate goal is to please the customer while acting reluctant to reject proposed changes in the requirements of the IT project. Gold-plating scope creep is different, and is a result of technologists adding substance or additions to the original requirements, because of perfectionism or lack of details in the initial business’ requirements.
