It might seem quite obvious, but can you answer the following question:

What is the scope of the project?  Or in other words, what do you need to produce to consider the project successfully finished?

I am sure you would at least be able to give an answer like “We have to develop (or upgrade, manufacture…)  a system (or component, SW program…) that has a defined functionality”.  And you might even be able to define this functionality as a set of requirements.  This is good, but it is far from complete.

Imagine two different projects.  Both have to deliver the same product with the same functionality.  Project A was contracted as a development project, and therefore the customer will ask for detailed requirements documents, design documents, blueprints and so on.  Project B was contracted as a COTS, and the customer is only expecting user level documentation, like user manuals or maintenance manuals.  Is the scope the same in both projects?  Not at all.  Project A will have to produce a lot more documents before considering it finished.

And the difference between two scopes could be subtler.  Only a change in the Quality standards or the Qualification methods could make a substantial difference in the workload required to finish the project.

So what do you have to do?  You have to write down:

• Project objective
• Deliverables (products, documents)
• Services (support, training, warranty…)
• Applicable standards (management, quality, configuration management, development life cycle…)
• Acceptance criteria

And when you have all this information, you have to communicate it to your team.  It is extremely important that everyone working on the project knows what the outcome of the project has to be.

A good definition of the scope will not automatically guarantee the project success, but a vague (or non-existent) scope will lead to misunderstandings within the team and problems in the customer acceptance.

Tags: deliverables, project definition, project manager, scope

This entry was posted on Saturday, December 12th, 2009 at 6:44 pm and is filed under Starting a Project. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.