PMP: 4. Project Scope Management

Project Scope Management includes the processes required to ensure that the project includes all the work required, and only the work required. And it’s concerned with defining and controlling what is and is not included in the project

Product Scope: features and functions that characterize a product, service, or result.

Project Scope: work performed to deliver a product, service, or result with the specified features and functions
-  The term “project scope” is sometimes viewed as including product scope
-  Project Scope is measured against the Project Management Plan
-  Product Scope is measured against the Product Requirements
-  Project life cycles can range along a continuum from predictive approaches at one end to adaptive or agile approaches at the other
-  In predictive life cycle the deliverables are defined at the beginning of the project and any changes to the scope are progressively managed
-  In adaptive/agile life cycle the deliverables are developed over multiple iterations where detailed scope is defined and approved for each iteration when it begins.
-  Projects with adaptive life cycles are intended to respond to high levels of change and require ongoing stakeholder engagement
-  Overall scope of an adaptive project will be decomposed into a set of requirements and work to be performed, sometimes referred to as a product backlog
-  At beginning of each iteration the team determine how many of highest priority item on backlog can be delivered on next iteration. Three Process are repeated each iteration (Collect Requirements, Define Scope and Create WBS)
-  In predictive life cycle Collect Requirements, Define Scope and Create WBS are performed at the beginning of the project and updated as necessary using change control process
-  In adaptive/agile the sponsor and customer representatives should be continuously engaged with the project to provide feedback on deliverables
-  In predictive projects, the scope baseline for the project is the approved version of the project scope statement, work breakdown structure (WBS), and its associated WBS dictionary
-  Business Analysis are used in some organizations to defining, managing, and controlling requirements activities
-  Activities of business analysis may start before a project is initiated and a project manager is assigned
-  Project manager is responsible for ensuring that requirements-related work is accounted
-  The relationship between a project manager and a business analyst should be a collaborative partnership
-  Agile methods deliberately spend less time trying to define and agree on scope in the early stage of the project and spend more time establishing the process for its ongoing discovery and refinement
-  In agile approaches, the requirements constitute the backlog.

Plan Scope Management (Planning Process Group)
Plan Scope Management is the process of creating a scope management plan that documents how the project and product scope will be defined, validated, and controlled
Key benefit of this process is that it provides guidance and direction on how scope will be managed throughout the project
-  This process is performed once or at predefined points
-  The development of the scope management plan and the detailing of the project scope begin with the analysis of information contained in the (project charter, latest approved subsidiary plans of the project management plan, historical information contained in OPA and EEF’s)

Plan Scope Management Inputs:
1- Project Charter
-  High-level project description assumptions, constraints, and high-level requirements.
2- Project Management Plan
-  Quality management plan: The way the project will be managed is influenced by organization quality policy, methodologies, and standards
-  Project life cycle description: determines the series of phases that a project passes through from its inception to the end of the project.
-  Development approach: The development approach defines whether waterfall, iterative, adaptive, agile, or a hybrid development approach will be used
3- Enterprise Environmental Factors
4- Organizational Process Assets

Plan Scope Management Tools & Techniques:

1- Expert Judgment
-  Previous similar projects and information in the industry, discipline and application area

2- Data Analysis
-  Alternative Analysis: Various ways of collecting requirements, create, validate and control scope.

3- Meetings
-  May include (Sponsor, project manager, team members and selected stakeholder)

Plan Scope Management Outputs:
1- Scope Management Plan
-  Component of the project management plan that describes how the scope will be defined, developed, monitored, controlled, and validated
-  Components includes processes that help (Preparing project scope statement, create WBS, how the baseline will be approved and maintained and how formal acceptance will be obtained)
-  The scope management plan can be formal or informal, broadly framed or highly detailed
2- Requirements Management Plan
-  The requirements management plan is a component of the project management plan that describes how project and product requirements will be analyzed, documented, and managed
-  It’s also referred as Business Analysis Plan according to Business analysis.
-  Components may include (Configuration management activities, Requirements prioritization, Metrics, Traceability structure and how requirements will be planned, tracked and reported)
Traceability structure reflects the requirement attributes captured on the traceability matrix.
Configuration management shows how changes will be initiated, how impacts will be analyzed, how they will be traced and reported and authorization levels to approve changes

Collect Requirements (Planning Process Group)
Collect Requirements is the process of determining, documenting, and managing stakeholder needs and requirements to meet objectives
Key benefit of this process is that it provides the basis for defining the product scope and project scope.
-  This process is performed once or at predefined points
-  The project’s success is directly influenced by active stakeholder involvement in the discovery and decomposition of needs into project and product requirements
-  Requirements include conditions or capabilities that are required to be present in a product to satisfy an agreement and business needs.
-  Requirements need to be elicited, analyzed, and recorded in enough detail to be included in the scope baseline and to be measured once project execution begins
-  Requirements become the foundation of the WBS Cost, schedule, quality planning, and procurement

Collect Requirements Inputs:
1- Project Charter
2- Project Management Plan
-  Includes (Scope management plan, Requirements management plan and Stakeholder engagement plan)
? Stakeholder engagement plan: used to understand stakeholder communication requirements and the level of stakeholder engagement in order to assess stakeholder requirements
3- Project Documents
-  Includes (Assumption Log, Lessons learned register and Stakeholder register)
? Stakeholder Register: used to identify stakeholders who can provide information on the requirements also captures requirements and expectations that stakeholders have for the project.
4- Business Documents
-  Business Case influence this process as it describes required, desired, and optional criteria for meeting the business needs
5- Agreements
-  contain project and product requirements.
6- Enterprise Environmental Factors
7- Organizational Process Assets

Collect Requirements Tools & Techniques:

1- Expert Judgment
-  Experts specialized in (Business analysis, Requirements elicitation, Requirements analysis Requirements documentation, Project requirements in previous similar projects, Diagramming techniques, Facilitation, and Conflict management)

2- Data Gathering
-  Brainstorming: used to generate and collect multiple ideas related to project/product requirements
-  Interviews: Can be formal & informal to elicit information by talking directly to them, and is usually performed by asked prepared or spontaneous questions and recording the responses. Interviews are useful for obtaining confidential information. It may include individual/multiple interviewers/interviewees
-  Focus Groups: Bring together prequalified stakeholders and subject matter experts to learn about their expectations and attitudes about proposed product/service. A trained moderator guides the group through interactive discussion to be more conversational than one-on-one interview
-  Questionnaires and surveys: written set of questions designed to quickly accumulate information of large number of respondents. It’s most appropriate with varied audiences, geographically dispersed for quick turnaround where statistical analysis could be appropriate.
-  Benchmarking: Comparing actual or planned products and processes to those of comparable organizations (internal or external) to identify best practices, generate ideas for improvement and provide a basis for measuring performance

3- Data Analysis
-  Document analysis which consists of reviewing and assessing any relevant documented information to elicit requirements by analyzing existing documentation and identifying information relevant to the requirements

4- Decision making
-  Voting: Used to classify and prioritize product requirements. (unanimity, majority and plurality)
-  Autocratic decision making: one individual takes responsibility for making the decision
-  Multicriteria decision analysis: decision matrix to provide a systematic analytical approach for establishing criteria, such as risk levels, uncertainty, and valuation, to evaluate and rank many ideas

5- Data Presentation
-  Affinity diagrams: allow large numbers of ideas to be classified into groups for review and analysis.
-  Mind mapping: consolidates ideas created through individual brainstorming sessions into a single map to reflect commonality and differences in understanding and to generate new ideas.

6- Interpersonal and Team Skills
-  Nominal group technique: Enhances brainstorming with a voting process used to rank the most useful ideas for further brainstorming or for prioritization. It includes four steps
? Question is posed to the group. Each person silently generates and writes down their ideas
? Moderator writes down the ideas on a flip chart until all ideas are recorded
? Each recorded idea is discussed until all group members have a clear understanding
? Individuals vote privately to prioritize the ideas. (Voting may take place in many rounds)
-  Observation and conversation (Job Shadowing): Direct way of viewing individuals in their environment and how they perform their jobs. Usually used when people have difficulty or reluctant to articulate their requirements. Usually it’s done externally by an observer viewing business expert performing the job. Also can be done by a participant observer who actually performs a process to experience how it’s done and uncover hidden requirements
-  Facilitation: Used with focused sessions that bring key stakeholders together to define product requirements. Workshops can be used to quickly define cross-functional requirements and reconcile stakeholder differences. This may increase stakeholder consensus and issues can be discovered earlier and resolved more quickly than in individual sessions. Examples
? Joint application design/development (JAD) used in software development industry
? Quality function deployment (QFD): using in manufacturing industry. It collects customer needs known as Voice of the Customer (VOC)
? User stories: short, textual descriptions of required functionality developed during workshops

7- Context Diagram
Example of Scope model. Context diagrams visually depict the product scope by showing a business system and how people and other systems (actors) interact with it. They show inputs to the business system, the actor(s) providing the input, the outputs from the business system, and the actor(s) receiving the output
? Actor ? Business System ?Output ? Actor

8- Prototypes
-  Method of obtaining early feedback on requirements by providing a model of the expected product. Examples (computer generated 2D, 3D models, mock-ups and simulations)
-  Prototypes support the concept of progressive elaboration
-  Storyboarding is a prototyping technique showing sequence or navigation through a series of images or illustrations. Used in films, advertising

Collect Requirements Outputs:
1- Requirements Documentation
-  Describes how individual requirements meet the business need for the project.
-  Requirements may start out at a high level and become progressively more detailed as more information about the requirements is known.
-  Requirements should be unambiguous (measurable and testable, traceable complete, consistent, and acceptable to key stakeholders)

Requirements can be classified into:
-  Business requirements
-  Stakeholder requirements
-  Solution requirements: Solution requirements grouped into functional (behavior of the product) & nonfunctional requirements (environmental qualities required to get an effective product)
-  Transition and readiness requirements: Describe temporary capabilities
-  Project requirements
-  Quality requirements

2- Requirements Traceability Matrix
-  Grid that links product requirements from their origin to the deliverables that satisfy them
-  Ensure that each requirement adds business value by linking it to the business/project objectives
-  Provides a means to track requirements throughout the project life cycle
-  Helping to ensure that requirements approved in the requirements documentation are delivered at the end of the project
-  Provides a structure for managing changes to the product scope
-  Attributes associated with each requirement can be recorded in the requirements traceability matrix
-  Matrix include unique identifier, a textual description of the requirement, the rationale for inclusion, owner source, priority, version, current status and status date
-  Additional attributes to ensure that the requirement has met stakeholders’ satisfaction may include stability, complexity, and acceptance

Define Scope (Planning Process Group)
Define Scope is the process of developing a detailed description of the project and product
Key benefit of this process is that it describes the product, service, or result boundaries and acceptance criteria
-  Since all the requirements identified in Collect Requirements may not be included in the project, the Define Scope process selects the final project requirements from the requirements documentation developed during the Collect Requirements process
-  Develops a detailed description of the project and product, service, or result.
-  The preparation of a detailed project scope statement builds upon the major deliverables, assumptions, and constraints that are documented during project initiation.
-  Define Scope process can be highly iterative
-  In iterative life cycle projects, a high-level vision will be developed for the overall project, but the detailed scope is determined one iteration at a time

Define Scope Inputs:

1- Project Charter
2- Project Management Plan
-  Scope management plan: How the project scope will be defined, validated and controlled
3- Project Documents
-  Includes (Assumption log, Requirements documentation and Risk register)
4- Enterprise Environmental Factors
5- Organizational Process Assets
 

Define Scope Tools & Techniques:
1- Knowledge Management
2- Data Analysis
-  Alternatives Analysis: to meet the requirements and the objectives identified in the charter
3- Decision Making
-  Multicriteria decision analysis
4- Interpersonal and Team Skills
-  Facilitation:
5- Product Analysis
-  Used to define products and services. It includes asking questions about a product or service
-  Requirements are captured at a high level and decomposed to the level of detail needed to design the final product
-  Examples include (Product breakdown, Requirements analysis, Systems analysis and engineering and value analysis and engineering)

Define Scope Tools & Outputs:
1- Project Scope Statement
-  Description of the project scope, major deliverables, assumptions, and constraints.
-  Project scope statement documents the entire scope, including project and product scope
-  Provides a common understanding of the project scope among project stakeholders
-  Project charter contains high level information while project scope statement includes detailed description of the scope components. They are progressively elaborated throughout the project
Project Scope Statement include (Product scope description, deliverables, acceptance criteria and project exclusions)

2- Project Document Updates
-  Includes (Assumption log, Requirements documentation, Requirements traceability matrix and Stakeholder register)

Create WBS (Planning Process Group)
Create WBS is the process of subdividing project deliverables and project work into smaller, more manageable components.
Key benefit of this process is that it provides a framework of what has to be delivered
-  This process is performed once or at predefined points
-  WBS is a hierarchical decomposition of the total scope of work to be carried out by the project team to accomplish the project objectives and create the required deliverables (top-down approach)
-  WBS organizes and defines the total scope of the project and represents the work specified in the current approved project scope statement
-  Planned work is contained within the lowest level of WBS components, which called Work Packages
-  Work Package can be used to group the activities where work is scheduled and estimated, monitored, and controlled

Create WBS Inputs:
1- Project Management Plan
-  Scope Management Plan
2- Project Documents
-  Includes (Project scope statement and Requirements documentation)
3- Enterprise Environmental Factors
4- Organizational Process Assets
 

Create WBS Tools & Techniques:
1- Expert Judgment
2- Decomposition
-  Technique used for dividing and subdividing the project scope and project deliverables into smaller, more manageable parts.
-  The work package is the work defined at the lowest level of the WBS for which cost and duration can be estimated and managed.
-  Popular methods to create WBS structure: top-down approach, the use of organization-specific guidelines, and the use of WBS templates
-  Bottom-up approach can be used to group subcomponents
-  Decomposition of the upper-level WBS components requires subdividing the work for each of the deliverables or subcomponents into its most fundamental components
-  Agile approaches decompose epics to user stories
-  Decomposition may not be possible for a deliverable or subcomponent that will be accomplished far into the future The project team usually waits until the deliverable or subcomponent is agreed on, so the details of the WBS can be developed. This technique called rolling wave planning.
-  The total of the work at the lowest levels should roll up to the higher levels so that nothing is left out and no extra work is performed. This is sometimes called the 100 percent rule.

Create WBS Outputs:
1- Scope Baseline
The scope baseline is the approved version of a scope statement, WBS, and its associated WBS dictionary and it’s component of the project management plan. Scope baseline includes
-  Project scope statement: description of the project scope, major deliverables and constraint.
-  WBS: Hierarchical decomposition of the total scope of work to be carried out by the project team to accomplish the project objectives and create the required deliverables. Each descending level of the WBS represents an increasingly detailed definition of the project work.
-  Work package: The lowest level of the WBS is work package with a unique identifier. Each work package is part of a control account which is a management control point where scope, budget, and schedule are integrated and compared to the earned value for performance measurement. Each control account has two or more work packages. But work package is associated with a single control account
-  Planning package: Include one or more planning packages. A planning package is a WBS component below the control account and above the work package with known work content but without detailed schedule activities
-  WBS dictionary: document that provides detailed deliverable, activity, and scheduling information about each component in the WBS. It’s a document that support the WBS because you can’t include all the information in the WBS. It contains (Codes, work description, assumption, milestones, associated activities, resources, cost, quality requirement, references)
2- Project Document Updates
-  Includes (Assumption log and Requirements documentation)

Validate Scope (Monitor and Controlling Process Group)
Validate Scope is the process of formalizing acceptance of the completed project deliverables
Key benefit of this process is that it brings objectivity to the acceptance process and increases the probability of final product, service, or result acceptance by validating each deliverable
-  This process is performed periodically throughout the project as needed
-  The verified deliverables obtained from the Control Quality process
-  The verified deliverables are approved through this process by the customer or sponsor to get the accepted deliverables
-  Validate Scope concerned with acceptance of the deliverables
-  Control Quality concerned with correctness of the deliverables

Validate Scope Inputs:
1- Project Management Plan
Includes (Scope management plan, Requirements management plan and Scope baseline)
2- Project Documents
Includes (Lessons learned register, Quality reports, Requirements documentation and Requirements traceability matrix)
3- Verified deliverables
-  Project deliverables that are completed and checked for correctness through Control Quality.
4- Work Performance Data
-  include the degree of compliance with requirements, number of nonconformities severity of the nonconformities, or the number of validation cycles performed in a period of time

Validate Scope Tools & Techniques:
1- Inspection
Includes activities such as measuring, examining, and validating to determine whether work/deliverables meet requirements and product acceptance criteria. They might be called “reviews and walkthroughs)
2- Decision Making
-  Voting

Validate Scope Outputs:
1- Accepted Deliverables
Deliverables that meet the acceptance criteria are formally signed and approved by customer/sponsor
2- Work Performance Information
-  includes information about project progress, such as which deliverables have been accepted and which have not been accepted and the reasons
3- Change Requests
-  The completed deliverables that have not been formally accepted are documented, along with the reasons for non-acceptance of those deliverables Those deliverables may require a change request for defect repair.
4- Project Document Updates
Includes (Lessons learned register, Quality reports, Requirements documentation and Requirements traceability matrix)

Control Scope (Monitor and Controlling Process Group)
Control Scope is the process of monitoring the status of the project and product scope and managing changes to the scope baseline.
Key benefit of this process is that the scope baseline is maintained throughout the project.
-  This process is performed throughout the project
-  Controlling the project scope ensures all requested changes and recommended corrective or preventive actions are processed through the Perform Integrated Change
-  Manage the actual changes when they occur and is integrated with the other control processes
-  The uncontrolled expansion to product or project scope without adjustments to time, cost, and resources is referred to as scope creep

Control Scope Inputs:
1- Project Management Plan
-  Includes (Scope management plan, Requirements management plan, Change management plan, Configuration management plan, Scope baseline and Performance measurement baseline)
? Performance measurement baseline When using earned value analysis, the performance measurement baseline is compared to actual results to determine if a change, corrective action, or preventive action is necessary
2- Project Documents
-  Includes (Lessons learned register, Quality reports, Requirements documentation and Requirements traceability matrix)
3- Work Performance Data
-  Work performance data can include the number of change requests received, the number of requests accepted, and the number of deliverables verified, validated, and completed
4- Organizational Process Assets

Control Scope Tools & Techniques:
1- Data Analysis
-  Variance analysis: compare the baseline to the actual results and determine if the variance is within the threshold amount (Variance = Planned – Actual)
-  Trend analysis: examines project performance over time to determine if performance is improving or deteriorating
Important aspects of project scope control include determining the cause and degree of variance relative to the scope baseline and deciding whether corrective or preventive action is required.

Control Scope Outputs:
1- Work Performance Information
-  correlated and contextualized information on how the project and product scope are performing compared to the scope baseline.
-  include the categories of the changes received, the identified scope variances and their causes, how they impact schedule or cost, and the forecast of the future scope performance
2- Change Requests
-  Analysis of project performance may result in a change request to the scope and schedule baselines
3- Project Management Plan Updates
-  Includes (Scope management plan, Scope baseline, Schedule baseline, Cost baseline and Performance measurement baseline)
4- Project Document Updates
-  Includes (Lessons learned register, Quality reports, Requirements documentation and Requirements traceability matrix)