Plan scope of your project

SCOPE as the name suggests is laser focus on project result. Project result is accomplished via proper planning of projects. Scope planning is the process of determining how we are going to perform the work. This involves planning the work and only the work needed to achieve the result.Chances are that we may try to entice the customer by providing extra work which is commonly referred to as gold plating which could have an hit on triple constraint(time,cost,scope). To overcome such problems project manager should be actively involved in scope planning to determine the work needed to achieve the result. Inputs : We use the following information as inputs while planning the scope of a project. We perform the work in the office environment. So we need to be aware of the enterprise environmental factors.We can make use of historical records, lessons learned from the knowledge base which is maintained by PMO(Project Management Office) which is organizational process asset. At the project initiation stage preliminary project scope statement is created which is an high-level overview of the work to be performed. This is refined further during scope planning and is taken as an input. The project management plan is the complete plan composed of sub-plans from different knowledg areas. It has to be taken as an input which is updated after planning the scope. Scope planning is determining the work needed to meet the stakeholders needs. Project charter is the document showing details on project's business need, business case and purpose for which the project is undertaken. So this document has to be an input. To summarize the input information needed for scope planning, we have : 1) Enterprise environmental factors 2) Organizational Process assets 3) Project charter 4) Preliminary Project scope statement 5) Project management plan Tools and Techniques : We need to act upon the inputs using tools and techniques to produce the desired end result which is the output. Following are the tools and techniques needed for scope planning : We can decide on the scope by referring information on previous projects of similar type. We can judge the resources, schedules based on expert judgement. The scope planning is to determine what work needs to be done, how do we do it and how do we create a WBS. To support these tasks we make use of templates such as WBS templates, scope management plan templates, standards to be adopted(eg: If the company is ISO certified we need to be sure that the work we perform are in compliance with the standard. For eg: if company has ISO14000 certification which is related to pollution control and saving environment the project work should include safety features to meet the same), forms such as scope change control forms. To summarize the tools and techniques needed for scope planning we have : 1) Expert judgement 2) Templates, standards and forms Outputs: The inputs when acted upon by the tools and techniques produce the output. Following is the output os scope planning : The plan on scope is scope management plan which gives information on how project scope will be defined,documented,verified,managed and controlled by the project team. Scope management plan is composed of some processes that are described below: 1) Process to prepare detailed project scope statement based on preliminary project scope statement 2) Process that enables the creation of the WBS from the detailed project scope statement 3) Process that establishes how the WBS will be maintained and approved 4) Process that defines how formal acceptance and verification of the completed project deliverables will be obtained 5) Process that determines how requests for changes to scope statement will be processed(Determines process involved in integrated change control - relevant to scope) To summarize the output from scope planning we get : 1) Project scope management plan