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A Scoop on Scope

A Process-Driven Approach to Avoiding Challenged Projects

"Outright failures of projects have declined from 40 to 23 percent during the past five years, but challenged projects swelled from 33 to 49 percent in the same period. That's bad because challenged projects often are more painful than projects that simply fail. And they are often just failures-in-waiting, dallying dismally until the patience (or the money) for getting them right runs out." - CIO Magazine

The most commonly cited issues for challenged projects:

  • Lack of executive support
  • Lack of stakeholder input
  • Incomplete or changing requirements, specifications and objectives
  • Unrealistic expectations

Project scope control and management is an often-ignored topic in the management ranks. However, the impact of lax scope control on the organization, its clients, its projects and its employees' careers can be devastating. As the opening analyst commentary clearly demonstrates, scope management is not someone else's problem. Management must recognize this threat and establish effective internal controls that deal with this often invisible and consistently underestimated risk.

This article provides a concise definition of scope management, discusses the focus of traditional project management, the importance of a disciplined and repeatable approach and the benefits of working towards process-driven project execution. The article presents key scope-related processes that need to be automated and shows how scope control substantially facilitates project governance. Finally, a quick scope management test helps you assess your team's scope maturity.

Scope Management

Scope defines what is or is not included in the project and controls what gets added or removed as the project proceeds. Scope management establishes control processes to address factors that may result in project change as it occurs. Project changes that impact scope include: requirements, constraints, assumptions and risk:

  • Requirements are the ultimate objectives of the project.
  • Constraints are limitations such as: time, budget, resource dependency, business, legal, organizational, technological and management constraints.
  • Assumptions are considered facts for planning purposes; for example, an IT project can assume a new system will not require routine IT resources and involvement after implementation is complete (assumptions need to be verified since they may or may not be valid).
  • Risk is any business or technical factor that has reasonable potential to impact the project (or its assumptions). Key risk characteristics include: probability of occurrence, impact of the risk if it occurs, mitigating action, and contingent action.

The Cost of Scope Change

Figure 1: Relative Cost of Repairing Defects at  Different Phases of a Project

Poor scope control has tremendous impact on project costs and is one of the main factors that can lead to project budget overruns and delays. As Figure 1 shows, scope changes in the later stages of a project can cost as much as 100 times more than requirement, specification and objective changes that occur in the initial phase.

Traditional Focus of Project Managers

Operational executives and project managers primarily focus on plans, schedules, tasks, deadlines, budgets, resources, priorities, collaboration on project deliverables and the tracking of milestones and project related meetings. Little to no attention is paid to work process institutionalization and automation. Management is generally not focused at all on defining, enforcing and improving repeatable processes. There is limited analysis of the negative impact of process inconsistencies and a fragmented strategy in dealing with operational control, compliance and governance issues.

Is Scope Change a Bad Thing?

There is nothing wrong with scope change; it is how scope change requests are managed that can have a detrimental impact on the project. In the early stages of a project, the  customer often cannot identify or clearly describe all requirements and objectives. Furthermore, business and market changes may force requirement, specification and scope change.

Traditional scope related problems:

  • Scope creep: seemingly small and incremental scope and requirement changes lead to substantial cost, budget and schedule overruns (death by a thousand wounds).
  • Unapproved changes: lack of discipline and clear scope management processes enable various team members to deviate from the original project definition and requirements.
  • Inconsistent scope management processes: projects that are dependant on multiple teams and external resources often lack consistent and centralized scope management processes which can lead to scope creep.
  • E-mail, conversation, project team sole initiatives: If not controlled, well-intentioned team members sometimes act on e-mails, conversations or on their own initiative to change project scope.

A Work Process

Unlike projects that almost never the same, a process has a very predictable (in fact, a predetermined) sequence. A work process is a scheduled or unscheduled unit of work. A work process is tracked based on expected (or implied) completion date, service level agreement (how fast a task must be completed), aging and escalation rules and policies. It follows a predefined flow and is routed based on the roles people play in the organization. There are also automatic notifications and work assignments that are generated as a work process goes through its defined flow.

Scope Management Processes

Figure 2 shows some of the key scope processes that need to be defined and formalized.

Figure 2: Key Scope Processes to be Defined and Formalized

For each process project stakeholders can agree on states, roles, assignments and responsibilities (who is responsible for what and who has approval authority). It is recommended that you use workflow-driven software to manage these processes. A workflow solution not only controls such a process but also provides auditing, reporting and analytics so that project managers and executives can measure performance, progress and capture best practices.

A sample scope change process designed in a BPM solution is displayed in Figure 3. It is important to note that this is not just a process diagram, the software actually controls, tracks and audits the scope change request process.

Figure 3: Sample Scope Change Process

Scoping Best Practices

Scope can be controlled and managed by applying the following best practices:

  • Use workflow software to track, institutionalize and audit scope and risk management processes.
  • Make sure that all work is traceable. You need to know what is the status of any work, who did what and who moved the process through its various steps.
  • Enforce your defined scope policies by making sure workflow software is used for scope related collaboration thereby making the process repeatable and consistent.
  • Establish control and approval processes for work breakdown structure (WBS) changes; so that project scope change is not initiated through unapproved work changes and task assignments.
  • Associate a "work order ID" to the statement of work (scope component); create a culture of discipline in which no one can work on a project unless they have an assigned work order ID.
  • As a second phase, work order can be linked to pay system, billing system, version control system. This should not be attempted immediately as an organization cannot go from no process maturity to a high level of process maturity.
  • Group small scope changes into one request.
  • Incorporate a contingency buffer per approved scope-set (and not per work order) to account for uncertainty; add contingency buffer for key project milestones at the project level (not task level)

How to Avoid Scope Creep

Regardless of your best efforts and even after implementing a consistent system to manage change, scope creep will always remain a danger. The following are some of the steps you can take to prevent or reduce scope creep:

  • Establish a scope baseline through a scope statement signoff.
  • Make incremental adjustments and clarifications as every project moves from concept to reality. Client may say: "that is not what I wanted" or "that is not what I meant."
  • Scope baseline may evolve naturally but at least there is reference point for comparison.

There will be resistance to scope freeze: too early and an unhappy customer, too late and project will be over budget/late. Scope freeze is a judgment call, and timing varies from project to project but should always be before financial commitment.

What if scope baseline cannot be agreed upon?

  • Work more with the customer until scope freeze is achieved, or
  • Agree to the work in phases: proceed with partial project execution. As partial project proceeds, the rest of the scope will be clarified and agreed to. A pilot, prototype or "fit to business analysis" subprojects are also very effective.

In general a project with many predetermined milestones and phases of short duration is far more likely to remain aligned with the project's ultimate objectives.

Scope Management Maturity Self-Assessment Test

Figure 4: Score Interpretation (all left hand side answers are the correct ones)
1 to 10: Scope management by prayer
10 to 24: Inconsistent project scope management
25 to 30: Mature and consistent scope management system


Rudolf Melik, CEO of Tenrox (www.tenrox.com), has more than 12 years of experience in the workforce and project management industry. For more information call Tenrox at (626) 796-6640, ext.1000 or send an e-mail to info@tenrox.com.

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