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What’s a project’s scope? Scope statement and project scope definitions
6 benefits of defining project scope in the early stages
How to define the scope of a project
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What’s a project’s scope? Scope statement and project scope definitions
6 benefits of defining project scope in the early stages
How to define the scope of a project
As you gear up for your next project, it's crucial to set off on the right foot by crafting a roadmap for your success. Whether you're gunning for that well-deserved promotion or aiming to foster better collaboration with your boss or coworkers, this is a key moment to flex your leadership skills and unite everyone under a common goal.
However, it's easy to get caught up in the excitement and rush ahead, inadvertently overlooking crucial details during the planning phase. Sometimes, that eagerness to make progress can undermine the importance of thorough preparation.
Amidst this hustle, a pivotal aspect of project planning can keep you grounded: your project scope. Defining scope encourages you to visualize the entire lifecycle of your project and narrow your team’s focus to what’s strictly necessary. Let’s explore how to use this project management step to assess the feasibility of your goals and make sure you give all the details their due diligence.
Project scope is used in project planning to define the main deliverables, goals, costs, and deadlines you need to complete a project. Defining these details helps you create a clear action plan according to your timeline and budgeting constraints.
These individual details collectively form the scope statement, which acts as a valuable reference for team members and project managers, offering them a clear understanding of their responsibilities and the anticipated outcomes.
Depending on the complexity of your project, you may need to distribute this document across departments to ensure everyone is on the same page. For example, if you’re working on a sneaker launch promotion, you want to align with the photography, product, and marketing teams to confirm all objectives can be met by the launch date.
No matter your project’s size and how many stakeholders are involved, proper planning is crucial to ensure everything goes according to your vision.
Although it’s exciting to start a new project and dive in as soon as possible, what saves you time in the beginning often comes back around. Here are seven benefits of defining your project’s scope in the early stages of project planning:
According to the Project Management Institute, “ambiguous or unrefined scope definition” is the number one cause of scope creep. In other words, without a clear scope, you risk wasting time and money on work that doesn’t benefit your end goal.
Outlining your project scope lays the groundwork for your project’s success by flagging the necessary milestones and making the right exclusions. Here are eight steps to follow when creating a project scope statement:
Your project’s objectives are the outcomes you want to achieve by its completion date. Outlining these objectives gives purpose and direction to the entire initiative — and your team. Without clear, realistic goals, your project is more susceptible to scope creep and can branch off to include deliverables or details that aren’t necessary.
In scope project management, resources can refer to budgets, inventory, and human bandwidth. A resource management plan outlines the available resources and how you intend to use them throughout the project. Knowing what resources are available from the beginning empowers you to create a reasonable timeline, define project boundaries, and gauge the feasibility of the project’s final outcome.
Before drafting your statement, you should collect and define any additional requirements that may influence your project’s scope. This could include external factors such as client deadlines or company policy. For example, if you’re a software engineer working on a sensitive company project, your work may require additional security requirements, such as encryption.
Once you’ve noted your goals and objectives and collected additional project requirements, it’s time to draft your project scope statement. Your statement should outline your project’s intended outcomes and the work your team will cover within the defined timeline.
Before running with your project scope statement and introducing it to the rest of your team, make sure to receive a sign-off from key stakeholders. This allows you to gain an outsider’s opinion on your project’s deliverables and make any necessary changes to ensure the client or C-suite is happy. This is especially important when answering to a higher-up within your organization who approves your budget and resources.
When working on large projects, deliverables, resources, and timelines often need to be adjusted as your team makes progress. Maybe funding fell through for the project budget and the scope of the project needs to be changed, or perhaps a product’s design didn’t meet expectations and needs to be redeveloped.
If you’re managing a complex project with multiple stakeholders, creating a change control process can help you reduce the risk of scope creep while promoting adaptability. A change control process is a predetermined procedure team leaders must go through before making changes to the project scope.
This process requires the project team to submit change requests to important stakeholders for approval each time they’d like to alter the content of their work.
Once your key stakeholders have reviewed the project scope statement and you’ve developed a proper change control process, it’s time to share the statement with your team. During this phase, team members can ask questions and discuss any concerns about the project’s progression or deliverables.
Often, individual contributors have the best insight into what is and isn’t achievable given their resources and skills.
Your project scope statement is more than a starting point for your project — it’s a great reference to review while conducting your work. Looking over the statement during each stage ensures you follow the correct order of operations while working on the initiative.
And as a manager, it can help you assess whether each team member is performing and actively contributing to the project’s success.
Although project scope statements lay the foundation for staying on track, unexpected changes and updates are part of the management process. It’s the project manager’s responsibility to evaluate possible modifications and document any changes made to the project’s scope.
When new information and opportunities arise, you must decide whether they contribute to the project's scope or deviate from achieving your intended objectives.
These change management processes grant the flexibility to make beneficial tweaks to workflow and resource management while remaining true to your project’s goals. Remember to stay open-minded when receiving ideas from your stakeholders and team members, as they may share valuable insight on how to improve your processes and the overall outcome of your project.
Knowing which components to include in your project scope statement and seeing an example in action are two very different things. Here are two templates for inspiration when creating your own statement:
If you’re a small designer launching a new sneaker, your project scope statement may look like this:
Project objective: to create a stylish, on-trend platform sneaker to launch in the spring/summer collection that caters to Gen Z and boosts overall brand recognition.
Resources
Additional requirements
Project roadmap and timeline
If you’re in charge of organizing a new website launch, your project scope statement could look like this:
Project objective: to redesign the company website to fit the new branding material and improve customer experience.
Resources
Additional requirements
Project roadmap and timeline
Defining the project scope is an important step in project management that points you and your team in the right direction. Before embarking on your next venture, create objectives, compile resources, and note project requirements to better understand how your initiative will run.
By laying this groundwork before kicking off work, you can account for any barriers and gauge your project’s potential for success more accurately.
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Elizabeth Perry is a Coach Community Manager at BetterUp. She uses strategic engagement strategies to cultivate a learning community across a global network of Coaches through in-person and virtual experiences, technology-enabled platforms, and strategic coaching industry partnerships.
With over 3 years of coaching experience and a certification in transformative leadership and life coaching from Sofia University, Elizabeth leverages transpersonal psychology expertise to help coaches and clients gain awareness of their behavioral and thought patterns, discover their purpose and passions, and elevate their potential. She is a lifelong student of psychology, personal growth, and human potential as well as an ICF-certified ACC transpersonal life and leadership Coach.
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