Key Concepts – Project Scope Management
Project Scope Management
Processes required to ensure that the project includes all the work required and only the work required.
Scope Management Plan
Describes how the scope will be defined, developed, monitored, controlled and verified.
Requirements management Plan
Describes how requirements will be analyzed, documented and managed.
Plan Scope Management
Process of creating a Scope Management Plan that documents how project scope will be defined, validated and controlled.
Collect Requirements
Process of determining, documenting and managing stakeholder needs and requirements.
Requirements Documentation
Documents that describes how individual requirement meets the business need of the project. This can take the form of business, stakeholder, solution, project and transition requirements.
Requirements Traceability Matrix
A grid that links product requirements from their origin to the deliverables that satisfy them. This ensures each requirement adds business value by linking to the project objectives.
Interviews
Formal or informal approach to elicit information from stakeholders by talking to them directly.
Focus Groups
Bringing together prequalified stakeholders and subject matter experts to learn their expectations and attitudes towards a product, service or result.
Facilitated Workshops
Focused sessions that bring key stakeholders together to define product requirements.
Group Creativity Technique
Several group activities can be organized to identify project and product requirements.
Brainstorming – Generate ideas without critique, analysis or prioritization.
Nominal Group Technique – Uses a voting process to rank and prioritize ideas.
Idea/Mind Mapping – Combine ideas into similar and dissimilar thoughts.
Affinity Diagram – Group ideas into categories.
Multi-criteria Decision Analysis – Utilizes a decision matrix of multiple ideas and selection criteria to evaluate and rank.
Group Decision Making Technique
Assessment process having multiple alternatives with an expected outcome in the form of future action.
Unanimity – Everyone agrees on a single course of action.
Majority – More than 50% agree on a single course of action.
Plurality – Largest block in a group decides, even if a majority is not achieved.
Dictatorship – One individual makes the decision for the group.
Questionnaires and Surveys
Written sets of questions designed to accumulate information from a large number of respondents.
Observation
Direct way of viewing individuals in their environment, how they perform their jobs and carry out processes to uncover hidden requirements.
Prototyping
Method of obtaining early feedback on requirements by providing a working model of the expected product before actually building it.
Benchmarking
Involves comparing actual or planned practices to those of comparable internal/external organizations to identify best practices, generate ideas for improvement and provide basis for measuring performance.
Context Diagram
Visually describe the product scope by showing a business system and how people and other systems interact with it.
Document Analysis
Identify requirements by analyzing documents i.e. business plans, marketing literature, agreements, requests for proposal, process flow diagram, laws, codes, ordinances etc.
Define Scope
Process of developing detailed description of the project and product.
Project Scope Statement
Describes project scope, major deliverables, assumptions, constraints, and work required to create those deliverables and may contain explicit scope exclusions. Unlike project charter, it contains a detailed description of the scope elements.
WBS Dictionary
Document that provides detailed deliverable, activity, and scheduling information on each WBS component.
Product Analysis
Includes techniques such as product breakdown, systems analysis, requirements analysis, system engineering, value engineering and value analysis.
Alternatives Generation
Developing different approaches to execute the project work.
Create WBS
Process of subdividing project deliverables and project work into smaller more manageable components.
Scope Baseline
Approved version of scope statement, WBS and WBS dictionary that can be changed only by formal change control procedure.
Validate Scope
Process of formalizing acceptance of the completed project deliverables.
Accepted Deliverables
Deliverables that meet the acceptance criteria are formally signed off and approved by the customer or sponsor. Formal acceptance documentation is forwarded to the Close Project or Phase Process.
Inspection
Measuring, examining and validating to determine whether work and deliverables meet requirements and product acceptance criteria.
Control Scope
Process of monitoring the status of the project and product scope and managing changes to the scope baseline.
Variance Analysis
Technique of determining the cause and difference between the baseline and actual performance.
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.