Requirements and Scope Statements: Defining Scope in your eLearning project

This is the second in a series of articles about using PMBOK methodologies to plan and execute eLearning projects. In this article, I’ll cover key points of Scope Management, focusing on gathering requirements and a scope statement.

Scope: it’s the core of any project. While determining the scope of your eLearning course, the decisions you make will have significant impact on the project itself, and how you manage it.

The first thing you need to do is collect requirements. As I mentioned in my previous article, the project itself may be kicked off with an email or even a quick 1-on-1 with the Project Sponsor (The Boss). You may have a clear idea in your head about how to proceed, and what to include in your course, but you have to make sure your “clear idea” matches everyone else’s ideas as well.

Collect Requirements

We’ll get into Stakeholder Management in a later article, but you’ll need to gather all your requirements from all your stakeholders. Failure to get this right means the project will be a mess, so you need to sit down with The Boss and find out the following:

• Who cares about this project?
• Who should care about this project? (maybe a SME or someone who’s job will be impacted by the course)
• How much influence will they have over the project? 

For a typical eLearning course, this list may be short. And if you have been doing several of these courses at your job, you likely have a “usual suspects” list of experts and contributors who have helped out before. Assuming you have good relationships, and that you can give them sufficient warning, you will likely be able to rely on them again.

However, don’t skip any of those 3 questions, and don’t just write up the same list of stakeholders as the last time you did a course. There may be requirements or even some “great ideas” from other people in the organization.

Types of Requirements

The PMBOK lists six types of requirements that will be hepful for your eLearning course. I’ll elaborate on each:

1. Business requirements
   High-level needs of the organization, and how this eLearning course fits in. Maybe it is for a specific client, or fills a specific niche or gap clients are experiencing.
2. Stakeholder requirements
   What the stakeholders say they want. Though note, they don’t always know what they want, so make sure to get all the info you can.
3. Solution requirements
   Features, functions, and characteristics of the course you’re developing. This may relate to the level of interactivity, or the tools you can/should use in development.
4. Transition requirements
   If you have an existing course that is being updated, you will want to list some transitional requirements, the delta between “what you have now” and your “future state”.
5. Project requirements
   What conditions does the course need to meet? What actions do you need to take? What stages do you need to go through (design, development, testing)?
6. Quality requirements
   Success criteria. How are you measuring the success of the course? What are your quality assurance/review processes?

Use your best judgment as to how you want to document all these requirements, but the above list (adapted from PMBOK fifth edition, p. 112) gives you a good place to start.

Requirements Traceability Matrix

The Requirements Traceability Matrix is a handy tool to track all your requirements. The point is to document where the requirements came from, and how the requirements have been met. In an eLearning course, that could be as simple as documenting:

Requirement: The Boss asked that we include all the colour options available for sticky notes.

Resolution: In section 3 of the course, we offer a clickable table displaying all colours available.

It can a very simple table. This is a great way to make sure you know what requirements stay in scope, and how to prove their coverage. It also provides a tool to review work in progress if the schedule starts to slip, and you need to make tough decisions about what requirements might have to be pushed off to a subsequent version of your course.

Scope Statement

So far, you’ve created your Project Charter, gathered your stakeholders and put their requirements into a Traceability Matrix. What’s next? Now, you need a Scope Statement for your eLearning course.

The Scope Statement is a bit more than a “statement”, but it need not be long and complex. It is simply a written statement describing the project, its limits and expectations. According to PMBOK, it needs to have the following sections:

• Product scope definition
• Acceptance criteria
• Deliverables
• Project exclusion
• Constraints
• Assumptions

There is some crossover between the Project Charter and the project scope statement. However, the Charter is very high level, and the scope statement has a lot more detail about the project. And the scope statement works as a more functional document for the organization; it’s a go-to location for all the important information about the project.

You can download my simple template here (it’s free, so you’ve got nothing to lose).

Concluding thoughts

Not every eLearning project will need to have tons and tons of planning documents. Remember that PMBOK tends to be a catch-all for all types of projects (anything from baking a cake to building a highway), so take a grain of salt occasionally with the text. However, managing scope and getting your requirements down is critical, so I highly recommend a detailed Scope Statement, as well as a detailed list of requirements and the traceability matrix.

Next time, I’ll write about Time Management and sequencing your eLearning project. Stay tuned.