Project Scope and Context

As you read, consider the importance of a clear scope statement in avoiding scope creep throughout the project.

Practical Tips

  • Engage all stakeholders: Your goal is to keep people meaningfully engaged in your project. You don't want stakeholders showing up for ceremonial appearances at project meetings. Instead, you want them seriously focused on the prospects for project success.
  • Outcome clarity: Ask your customer to define success right at the beginning. Then, working with the customer and other stakeholders, define how success will be measured.
  • Use a common vocabulary: At the beginning of any project, go to your end-customers and learn their vocabulary. Make sure you understand the terms that are important to them and what such terms mean to them. Whenever possible, use your customer's vocabulary, not yours. Also, strive to speak in plain English whenever you can, and avoid techno speak.
  • Create a glossary of terms: On projects with a lot of complex jargon, consider creating a glossary of terms. Then publish it in a way that makes it accessible to all stakeholders, updating it as needed. Here's an example of one such glossary: "COSO Framework".
  • Identify what you don't know: When you start a project, there are always things you don't know. The key is to know that you don't know them. The more you strive to recognize this, the better you will be at predicting those unknowns and making provisions for them.
  • Have key team members sign major project documents: Research shows that the act of signing a document makes people much more committed to delivering on the promises described in the document. Consider asking the entire project team to sign the project charter and scope documents. This simple act can serve as a powerful inducement to completing the project successfully.
  • Proactive concurrency: In the early stages, avoid the trap of plotting one thing after another, in a linear fashion. Instead, start fast, doing as many things as you can concurrently, as quickly as you can. This will give you a sense of whether or not the scope, budget, resources, and schedule are all in relatively close alignment at the macro scale. If you find they are not, report that to management right away.
  • Permanent urgency: In the living order in which all modern projects unfold, permanent urgency is the new law of nature. In the traditional, geometric order form of project management, you could assume that you would have sufficient time and resources to do things in a linear, step-by-step manner. But in the modern world, that's rarely the case. Get used to an element of urgency in all projects. Try not to let this paralyze you and your team. Instead, let a sense of urgency spur you on to more agile, alert, and flexible project management techniques.
  • Post the project documents prominently: Putting important documents front and center helps a team stay focused, especially if you have everyone sign them first. It also encourages the team to update them when necessary.
  • Plan for errors: You and your team will almost certainly make mistakes, especially in the early stages of a project. So plan for that. Keep thinking ahead to what might go wrong, and how you could correct your course. Make a habit of keeping back-up plans in your back pocket.
  • Define sign-off or acceptance criteria: One good way to get success defined is to start by drawing up sign-off criteria, or acceptance criteria as they are sometimes called. These are agreed-on deliverables for each key stage of the project that allows the stage to be considered complete. It's common to link these criteria to payments. The value of these criteria being defined at the beginning is that they are usually very objective and can continually be referred back to, thus ensuring that all activities are aligned with final deliverables. Major disagreements on whether a project was a success usually come down to a failure to define acceptance criteria. Achieving agreement on this is essential, as it drives everything else (resources, time, budgets, etc.).
  • Be prepared for change: Don't be fooled into thinking that, just because you have created all the documents associated with project initiation, you have everything nailed down. It's often not possible to foresee the kinds of ongoing changes that arise in the living order.