How clearly defined scope helps in keeping project on track?

While you are working on project, it is very important to have clarity on the scope.

You must have experienced a situation where customer is not satisfied with your output and thinks that you have not worked on a particular feature. This situation arises when the scope is not clearly defined and agreed upon by all concerned people.

While the term scope is used here in general, it includes Project Scope and Product Scope. This is applicable when you are creating a product as a part of your project.

Project scope includes all the deliverable of project and product scope includes information about the product.

Most of the time when project management is not followed properly, scope is not clearly defined and documented. Rather, it is observed that people are hesitant to put scope in black and white. Due to this, at the end of project lot of demands are raised by customers and project team is confused on how to fulfill the demands. This is where fire fighting comes into picture and project derails.

It is also observed that most of the time project exclusions are not clearly defined keeping room for ambiguity at the end of project. Exclusions is the list of items which are not the part of project. It is very important to document the exclusions to avoid any surprises at the end.

People feel that having scope definition and exclusions in black and white may irritate the customer when it is externally driven project and key stakeholders may not like it. This scenario is very common when customer has muscle power. Role of project manager is very crucial in such projects.

If scope and exclusions are not clearly defined, it may burden the project team and it may hamper quality of output and reduce the profitability of your organization. Project manager should learn this art of negotiating terms with stakeholders to ensure that organization’s interest is not at stake. 

In addition to clearly defined scope and exclusions, it is also very important to mention assumptions and constraints while defining the scope.

Another very important aspect of project scope is clearly defined criteria of accepting the deliverable. It means, you should put down very clearly the criteria which will declare the acceptance of what you have delivered. 

For example, suppose you are working on website design project for your client, you should clearly define the criteria which when delivered by you will mark the acceptance by client. Criteria in this case could be all the design files of website to be shared with client, creating user manual on how to update and maintain website, configuring SSL Certificate on the website, uploading the files on hosting server, website clearly seen on all types of devices etc. If acceptance criteria are defined beforehand, it is very easy to arrive at conclusion and your payments can be released on time.

Exclusions in this example could be, you will not pay for the hosting server fees and assumption could be content for the web-pages will be provided by your client.

Have you realized how clearly defined scope helps in keeping project on track? Are you defining the scope clearly? or doing fire fighting to satisfy customer?