What is the best way to define the scope of an ERP project?

1 What is scope?

Scope is the extent and boundaries of your ERP project, including what you want to achieve, what features and functions you need, what resources and time you have, and what risks and assumptions you make. Defining the scope of your ERP project is essential to align your objectives, expectations, and requirements with your stakeholders, vendors, and users. It also helps you to plan, manage, and control your project activities and deliverables.

2 Why is scope important?

Scope is essential for the success and value of your ERP project. A well-defined scope can help you focus on your business needs and priorities, communicate clearly with your project team and stakeholders, manage change requests, monitor and measure progress, and deliver a quality product. On the other hand, a poorly defined scope can cause confusion and conflicts among stakeholders, waste time and money on unnecessary features, increase risk of errors and defects, reduce user satisfaction, and lower return on investment.

3 How to define scope?

Defining the scope of an ERP project requires careful consideration, but there are best practices and steps to follow in order to ensure a clear and realistic scope. Start by conducting a thorough business analysis to understand your current state, desired state, and gap analysis. Also, define your project vision, goals, objectives, and success criteria. Engage key stakeholders and users and document their functional and non-functional requirements. Prioritize these requirements based on their importance, urgency, and feasibility. Validate the requirements with stakeholders and users and create a scope statement that summarizes the project scope, deliverables, exclusions, constraints, and assumptions. After obtaining approval from the project sponsor and steering committee, create a work breakdown structure that breaks down the project scope into manageable tasks and subtasks. Estimate the duration, dependencies, and resources of each task and subtask to create a project schedule as well as a budget for each task.

4 How to manage scope?

Defining the scope of your ERP project is not enough; you also need to manage your scope throughout the project lifecycle to ensure that you deliver on your promises. To do this effectively, it's necessary to establish a scope management plan, create a baseline of the scope statement, work breakdown structure, project schedule, and project budget. Additionally, tracking and reporting scope performance and variances against the baseline is essential. Furthermore, implementing a change management process for handling and approving changes to the scope, conducting regular reviews and audits of scope quality and completeness, managing stakeholder and user expectations and feedback, and resolving any conflicts promptly are all important steps in managing your scope.

5 How to avoid scope pitfalls?

Defining the scope of an ERP project is a critical and challenging task that requires careful planning, analysis, communication, and management. Even with a well-defined and managed scope, you may still encounter some challenges and pitfalls that can derail your ERP project. Scope creep, gold plating, and unrealistic expectations are some of the most common issues to look out for. To avoid scope creep, you need to have a clear and agreed scope statement, a robust change management process, and a strong project governance structure. Gold plating should be avoided by sticking to the scope statement, prioritizing requirements, and focusing on delivering value and quality. Unrealistic expectations should be managed by communicating the scope clearly and frequently, actively managing stakeholders and users, and setting and managing expectations realistically. By following these best practices and steps outlined in this article, you can define the scope of your ERP project effectively and efficiently, helping to ensure your project success and value.