• Project Management

Complete Guide to Project Scope Management

Having a project run smoothly from start to finish is every project manager’s dream. However, going through a whole project without issues, delays, and budget issues is extremely rare.

To help give you the best chance of leading a successful project, we’ve created a comprehensive guide to project scope management. By following this process, you should be able to define, document, and manage all the work required to complete your project successfully.

We’re going to tell you exactly what project scope management is, why it’s important for your project, and the steps you can take to put one together.

What is Project Scope Management?

Project scope management is an important part of project management that involves clearly defining and controlling what is included and what is not included in a project. 

The main objective is to ensure that the project includes all the work required, and only the work required. The scoping process should outline the project’s:

  • Objectives
  • Tasks
  • Deadlines
  • Outputs
  • Budgets
  • Costs

Why is Scope Management Important?

Project scope management helps minimise issues that could arise while carrying out your project, and keeps everyone’s focus on the essential tasks and objectives. A solid scoping plan should give all stakeholders a mutual understanding of the project’s goals and deliverables. It ensures that everyone stays on track and does not get distracted by irrelevant tasks that do not help achieve the project’s deliverables.

A clear scope should result in time being efficiently used and give you the best chance of deadlines being met.

How to Create a Project Scoping Plan

Getting your project scope wrong could lead to problems occurring during your project. To help you, we’ve put together six steps you can follow to create your own comprehensive project scoping plan.

1. Create your scope plan

The first step in the project scoping process involves creating your scope plan document. This should involve establishing a project timeline, allocating project resources, and setting project goals.

To do this, it might be worth involving all the project stakeholders. By doing this, you will be able to get the input of everyone involved in the project, which prevents any important aspects of the scope planning stage being missed.

Creating a scope plan also gives you the opportunity to design a process for when ad-hoc issues or tasks arise while the project is underway. If you’ve ever led a project before, you’ll know that even with the most meticulous planning, unexpected things always happen, without fail. Having a process in place for when this happens means the issue can be swiftly dealt with, and the project can move forward.

2. Collect project requirements

This stage of the project scoping process focuses on gathering detailed information from stakeholders. This guarantees that the project meets their needs and expectations. 

You can use various techniques to collect the requirements of project stakeholders, such as interviews, surveys, focus groups, and workshops. After doing this, you should be able to establish the following:

  • What are your definitive deliverables?
  • What deadlines need to be met in order for the project to be successful?
  • How often you need to meet with important stakeholders to provide project updates
  • The format and frequency of communications
  • Any other specific requirements of each stakeholder

All the requirements gathered from this part of the process should be correctly stored and accessible for the relevant project managers.

Learn how to build a winning project strategy here. 

3. Define the project scope

This part of the process involves developing a detailed project scope statement. This should clearly outline the project’s deliverables, and the work required by project stakeholders to reach these deliverables. 

The scope statement serves as a critical reference point for all project stakeholders, and will give everyone a common understanding of the project scope. Project scope statements typically include, but are not limited to:

  • Project purpose – The reason for the project
  • Goals – What does the project aim to achieve?
  • Deliverables – Specific outcomes or products that will be delivered upon project completion
  • Resources – Preliminary estimates of the quantity and type of resources required for each phase or task within the project
  • Constraints – Limitations or restrictions that impact the project. This could be budget, time, resources, or technology
  • Assumptions – What is considered true at the time of planning the project. This could be budgets, team member availability, resources, materials etc
  • Potential risks – issues that could impact the project scope and their potential impact
  • Costs – financial estimates for completing the project

However, you do not need to include all of these elements in your project scope statement. Only include what is relevant to your specific project.

4. Create a Work Breakdown Structure (WBS)

From the work you’ve carried out in the previous steps, you should now be able to build a Work Breakdown Structure. This is where you divide all the planned project work into smaller, individual tasks and subtasks, and then delegate these to the appropriate team members.

By doing this, you will be able to see a complete overview of each component of the project, which you can then schedule, monitor, and control. When creating your WBS, you should ensure that team member workflows are automated. Automating team member workflows can streamline project coordination and improve project visibility. 

Utilising project management software such as Verto for this automation reduces the need for manual information gathering and eliminates redundant tasks, allowing your team to focus on the project’s priorities.

Learn how Verto can streamline your workflows here. 

5. Validate your project scope

This simply means the deliverables of the project are reviewed, agreed, and signed off by the relevant project stakeholders. This involves formal acceptance of the completed deliverables, often through inspections and reviews.

Before presenting the deliverables, they should be inspected by yourself and project team members to make sure that nothing is missed, and give you the best chance of the deliverables being agreed. 

Disagreements at this part of the planning process can lead to the project being delayed, increased costs, and potential conflicts among stakeholders, which can ultimately compromise the project’s success. There should be a process in place to determine how project deliverables will be accepted as complete.

Learn how to speak stakeholder language with this guide – The Principles of Stakeholder Management

6. Control project scope

Controlling the scope is the last step of project scope management. This involves monitoring the project’s ongoing progress and managing changes to the scope. This includes making sure that any detours from the planned scope are identified and addressed immediately to prevent scope creep. 

Understand how to measure ongoing success here – The Critical Success Factors of Project Management

The best way to control the project scope is to use a single, centralised tool, specialising in project management functionality. Verto is used and trusted by many public sector organisations to streamline project management by holding detailed plans and allowing for the scope of the project to be pulled directly from within the platform. Our software is tailored to work for your exact requirements, in a way that suits you and your team.

With Verto, you can:

Verto is designed for organisations looking to enhance their project delivery effectiveness. Book a demo today, or get in touch with our specialist team for more information.