What is a Scope Management Plan and How to Apply It Properly?
Project managers need a draft or layout to define the scope of their project. The best way to do it is to have a scope management plan. This plan is being designed by project managers to describe how the project will be developed, monitored and verified under their supervision.
If you draft the scope management plan thoroughly, you will properly execute the project in a synchronized manner. Designing this plan requires many essential factors and parameters. But unfortunately, not all specialists pay enough attention to this important part of project management.
What is the scope of management? What should be included in a scope management plan? In this post, we describe all the basic components of the plan and highlight the importance of its appliance.
What is Project Scope?
Project scope means how a project’s purposes and objectives are defined. It is also about the deliverables, the tasks required to make these deliverables, the costs, and the deadlines. All these are the parameters of the whole project.
With the help of the scope, you clearly understand the project boundaries, who will be responsible for the tasks that make up the project, and the process that ensures everything is done in a proper way. This info is typically gathered in a Scope statement also known as Statement of work.
What is a Scope Management Plan?
A scope management plan is an important component of the project management plan. The key goal of this plan is to describe how the scope will be explained, developed, structured, controlled and validated.
The scope management plan includes the processes that are used to ensure that the project contains all the tasks needed to complete the project, excluding the tasks that are out of scope.
How do you write a scope management plan? There are basic elements that you probably use while preparing this PM doc.
What is Included in a Scope Management Plan?
A well-prepared scope management plan contains the following sections:
Requirements
Identifying requirements includes contacts and meetings with the stakeholders, prioritizing all of the external requirements your project must meet. Make sure you do not miss anything.
Most projects have numerous requirements originating from stakeholders, and it’s often easy to miss one minor requirement that has a huge ability to affect the whole project.
Scope statement
Scope statement that defines the entire project is the core of the scope management plan. According to the PMBOK Guide, the scope statement doc is a written description of the project scope, major deliverables, assumptions, and constraints. It states what work will be part of the project and what will not.
It is almost impossible to define all bottlenecks and risks at the beginning of the project, but it is always better to spend a little bit of extra time defining the scope. This typically reaps rewards throughout the project.
Project owner/stakeholders
A scope management plan should also include details regarding the project owner or the stakeholders who give the vision of the project.
A stakeholder is an ultimate decision-maker for the project. This person must be always aware of the progress and project advancements at every stage.
Work Breakdown Structure
Work breakdown structure (WBS) is the division of the project into tasks. The WBS concept is the basis of modern project management techniques because every single task is analyzed throughout the project for schedule and budget progress (called Earned Value Management). The task budget includes all task’s resources, including tools, man-hours, equipment, and contractor costs.
WBS dictionary
The WBS Dictionary itemizes the following things for each work item:
- Identification number or code
- Work description
- Responsible organization/ individual
Besides this minimum amount of information, the other points may contain deadlines, start date, budget, milestones, and other resources required in carrying out the work item.
Roles and responsibilities
Each scope part should relate to the task manager, technical expert, or any other responsible person of the project team.
These roles and their responsibilities should be recognized at the project outset. Responsibilities may be changed throughout the project, especially if the scope changes.
Deliverables
Most projects strive to deliver physical things such as a computer program, building, report, and so on. Deliverables can be non-physical as well. For example, a redesigned product or any kind of process improvement. All deliverables should be determined as part of the scope management plan to avoid confusion regarding what the project will produce.
Stakeholder acceptance
Acceptance of deliverables is a centralized part of the scope definition process. Project deliverables should be identified and the WBS itemized in a proper way. Scope acceptance docs are also included in the scope management plan.
Scope control
When project managers ignore a scope control process, there can be problems on the horizon. These problems relate to a toxic parasite that will destroy your project and your project management career. The name of this parasite is Scope creep.
It is about the slow and steady addition of unauthorized tasks to the project. If you do not monitor them, it can result in terrifyingly bad project issues.
That’s why it’s important to provide special procedures for inspecting the scope at regular intervals.
5 Tips on How to Create an Incredible Scope Management Plan
Project managers are expected to have deep knowledge and professional skills regarding scope management. Here are some basic steps you should follow while creating a powerful scope management plan:
- Pay attention to the gathering of the requirement details, as it is the most important step in any scope management plan. Without defining the project requirements, you will not be able to move your project on.
- Clearly define the objectives and demands of your project. It will ensure that the deliverables are attainable or not. Make sure you remember about workforce management as it is also a crucial part of the project accomplishment.
- Draft the scope plan first and note all essential components and details at one point. This initial draft should also include scheduling and prioritizing the stages, discussions, presentations, recognizing roles and responsibilities, budget and costing issues.
- Clarify all the aspects of the project scope in advance in order to simplify the identification of the requirements and deliverables.
- Make sure you are aware of the tools and strategies being used in the process and execution of the scope management plan.
Project Management Software for Tracking and Reporting on the Scope Management Plan
There are many aspects of creating a scope management plan where modern project management software comes to rescue.
Hygger.io is designed to make the process easier and more efficient.
- The tool will help you to carefully collect all the tasks that make up your project.
- Hygger timelines based on Gantt charts will help to make scheduling processes more effective. Add start and end dates to each task, note the duration and share timelines with your team members.
- The real-time dashboard will provide you with the metrics for progress, workload, tasks and more.
- Hygger has different views, from handy task lists to colorful Kanban boards, where tasks, cards, and columns represent your project’s phases.
Hopefully, considering and following everything described above will ensure your projects don’t become part of the statistics for project failure. If you have anything to add or comment, please, feel free to do it right there below.
