How Project Scope Management Help in Monitoring Process Group
Being a project manager, it is your duty to him to run a project smoothly from the beginning to completion. And while doing so, he focuses on certain important matters like keeping everything within budget and making the project final within the deadline. But things are not like that in reality.
Every project manager sits with his team, discusses his plan, and makes a blueprint where he also includes the stakeholders. But, in reality, the picture becomes different, and there is always something that changes the project’s scope during running. Scope creep is a serious issue for project managers that affect the project by more than 50% during the final execution. The proper project management training can also save you there.
So, it is not only about doing the course or training but also about the work experience and efficiency of the project manager that helps them to run the project successfully, assure the predetermined scope to achieve the project goal, and avoid issues like scope creep. Having an idea of project scope management will help you monitor the process group.
What Is Project Scope Management?
It is a process that aids in determining and fixing the goals of the project, tasks related to it, deliverables, budgets, and deadlines. Project management is all about having modifications midway when the project is already running.
When the scope of a project is defined at the beginning, it becomes simpler to manage the project in between and make changes when the project management team requires it.
What is the Importance of Scope in Project Management?
A project manager is dedicated to handling the expectations of the clients and stakeholders, which is quite challenging. When the project’s scope is pre-defined, project managers never get off-track and ensure that all the deadlines will be met perfectly.
If a project manager fixes a well-defined scope at the beginning of the project, he can surely avoid the following issues-
- Changing the requirements constantly
- Changing the direction of the project the mid-way of it
- Crossing the predetermined budget
- Realizing the final result won’t match the one that was expected
- Missing the project deadlines
With effective project scope management, you don’t need to face such issues as it gives you a clear idea about the required time, cost of the overall project, and the labor you need to put into it. Once you fix things beforehand, you know what is required for your project and what is not. Deciding the project’s scope keeps the control of it the project manager so that he can address the elements needed to be changed while running the project itself.
How to Define the Project Scope?
Project scope belongs to the project planning process, which determines the fixed goals of the project, deliverables, budget, features, etc. The scope document fixes a list of certain activities that lead to the project’s successful completion.
Once the project manager understands the requirements and expectations of the clients, he can define the project’s scope. The scope statement contains-
- Objectives of the project
- Exclusions
- Deliverables
- Constraints of the project
- Assumptions from the project
What Is Scope Statement in Project Management?
The scope statement is the statement of the work or the scope document. It consists of-
- The details of the boundaries of the project, along with the responsibilities of the team
- The processes that are required to verify and approve the finished project
- The definite guidelines for the team members that help them to take any decisions related to the project
When finalizing a project’s scope statement, the project manager and the stakeholders must be very careful to avoid scope creep. Scope creep a situation that may arise during the project when it seems difficult to finish certain parts of the project within the deadline and fixed budget. Such things happen due to miscommunication and poor planning.
An effective project scope management team can finish a project within the deadline and provide the requirements effectively.
Processes of Project Scope Management
There are six processes entwined with project scope management. A brief discussion on those will clear your idea of how project scope management monitors the process group. Read on to know more-
- Planning Scope Management
This is the first process in project scope management where the project manager creates a scope document that can be referred to later. The document includes the following-
- Detailed project scope statement
- Deliverables
- Breakdown of the requirements from the project
- Project change control process
- Collection of the Requirements
In this step, the project manager and his team work on the requirements and expectations of the stakeholders. By obtaining interviews, surveys, etc., they get an idea about the requirements, expectations, budget, deliverables, etc. After all the collection, you must have-
- Functional and non-functional requirements
- Requirements of the stakeholders
- Requirements of the business
- Support and training requirements
- Requirements from the project
- Defining the Scope
Once you know all the requirements, you need to turn those into a detailed description of the service or products you will deliver. This is when you can plan the scope statement you will refer to throughout the project.
- Making a Project Breakdown Structure
Project breakdown structure means breaking the entire project into small parts and assigning those to different team members.
- Validating Scope
Here, you need to send the deliverables and scope of the project to the stakeholders and the project executives for approval. Scope validation should always be done before starting the project so that you can easily find any loopholes.
- Controlling Scope
Finally, when the project begins, the project manager should always ensure that it maintains the pre-defined scope.
So, here you get how project scope management can monitor process groups. Being a project manager, you must be efficient enough to lead the entire process.
