The scope statement sets the boundaries of your project. It states a common understanding among all project stakeholders. It sets their expectations about what is going to be included in the project. Getting your scope right is one of the success factors of your project.
These are 7 common points usually missed when developing a scope statement:
- Understand the business objectives: discuss the business objectives with your stakeholders before writing the scope statement. Sometimes business objectives are not clearly stated. Alternatively, stakeholders often jump into implementation details. Take them back and have a discussion focused on the objectives. If business objectives are not considered and fully met in the scope statement, the project could fail, even if it was technically implemented well.
- Include all stakeholders: If you missed a stakeholder then your scope is not complete. Stakeholders identification prior to scoping is important. A missed stakeholder means that you have to revise your scope statement later on during project execution, which leads to revising all of your plans and estimates.
- Manage conflicts: I have heard it a lot: “What they are saying is not right, this can’t be implemented”. Stakeholders do have conflicts sometimes and you have to manage them. Start with common grounds. We all agree on the business objectives. Refer to standards and market best practices to push for a specific approach and try to get everyone on board.
- Keep it concise: Write your scope in a simple business English. No fancy technical jargon. Remember, that the audience of your scope are the project stakeholders. If you have to include some acronyms or technical terms, include a table of “Terms and Definitions”, where you write a brief definition of every term.
- Keep it clear: No room for ambiguity in the scope statement. Everything should be stated clearly. You will keep referring back to the scope statement during the execution of your project. Disagreements with the stakeholders due to the ambiguity will be costly in later stages of the project.
- Make it realistic: “Is this impossible to implement?”. In theory, every thing is possible in system development. But it comes at a cost and time. Write your scope statement in a way that is reasonably achievable with the resources that you have within your organisation.
- Analyse the impact: no project is executed in a vacuum. You have to analyse the impact of your scope on other components. Your scope might increase (or even decrease) based on the analysis results.
What could be the impact of a not-well written scope statement?
- You might have a scope creep, where the project is going through continuous or uncontrolled growth.
- You might face a problem in the project closure, where it is difficult to verify the deliverable against the scope statement.
Finally what I could say in a nutshell, If you can’t scope it you can’t make it!
7 points usually missed when scoping a software project