What is Scope

The difference between project scope and product scope

When talking about project scope, you are defining what work has to be done to finish the product and deliver it to the end customer. Whereas product scope, is deeply connected to the functionality of the product itself. While defining the scope, it is paramount to clearly define what is included and equally important, what is excluded from the project. Typically done in an interview, requirements are captured to define the project scope statement: a description of what the project includes. In this statement, the acceptance criteria, inclusions/exclusions, constraints and a description are presented to the stakeholders. Once an agreement is reached, it is used as the foundation block of all decisions being made about the project.

Why it is important to breakdown the included deliverables

A work breakdown structure is important for making a project easier to manage. Breaking things down into smaller components, means turning high level descriptions into specific steps to be taken. These are known as work packages and combined, they should cover the entire scope of the project. Therefor, these components should be unique items with absolutely no overlap with any of the other packages in the outlined structure. By defining the what of each component, things are defined without any concept of chronological order. By doing so, things can be planned without any hard dependency on any of the other work packages.

The benefit of this is:

• the reassurance about identifying all of the work to be done which in turn allows to make realistic estimations about the costs and duration of a project.
• The more each component is broken down, the easier it gets to make accurate predications as well.
• In turn these components form the building blocks to determine which profiles are necessary to execute them as well as how many people are needed.
• This makes providing incremental updates about the project' status much easier and increases the chance of success.

Handling uncertainty and preventing scope creep

Things are never certain and when it comes to the scope of a project, sometimes changes are necessary. It could be that some deliverables are overlooked or something unforseen blocks the way things are built. Be that as it may, changing the scope should be a controlled mechanism in the form of change requests where together with the stakeholder, the impact on the project is evaluated by the required changes. Having the scope of a project under control is an important tool to prevent the entire project going off the rails by introducing scope creep.