A well-defined project scope determines the objectives of the project and informs the project team of what is included in the project and what is excluded.
Projects are a coordinated effort potentially involving many individuals, businesses, organisations and technologies. Systems are created in projects.
Project scope is a statement of everything that will be involved in a specific project. This includes:
- the resources involved in the project
- the information that will be accumulated during the project
- the artifacts the project will deliver
- all planned work activities.
The scope of a project is extractable from the requirements of the system, since those requirements ultimately define what the system should be and determine the amount of effort required to produce the system.
Who performs scoping?
Because project scope is related to system requirements, project scoping is normally not possible in the planning phase of the project and instead occurs during the early or middle stages of the analysis phase.
Systems analysts are able to influence project scope, either directly or indirectly, by identifying and refining requirements.
The project manager uses the requirements to envision the scope of resources, work and artifacts required to transform the requirements into a complete system. So, the act of defining project scope is generally performed by the project manager as they are responsible for all details of the project and have oversight over all project activities.
Unfortunately, defining project scope can be difficult because it requires the project’s stakeholders to agree on what the project will encompass at an early stage of the software life cycle, when there is often much uncertainty.
The importance of scoping
A well-defined scope ensures the efforts of the project team are focused on the set objectives of the project.
A poorly defined project scope can lead to wasted resources as effort is directed towards tasks that are later found to be unnecessary; a well-defined scope identifies such work as outside of the project.
Another way in which poorly defined scope can harm a project is in scope creep, in which the project gradually grows and the system incorporates more and more features; this can cause the project to run over cost and over time.
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