To continue the trail of thought about the core of project management, I would like to cover one of the most important areas in project planning: scope management. Not the whole spectrum of scope management (this would result in a huge article), just the planning side of it. When you plan your project scope, what does it really mean? I’ll try to answer this question and would love to see you to share your view as well.

While analyzing what it means to plan your project’s scope, I keep getting back to only three central ideas:

What Do I Want to Deliver?

This is the first and most important question about scope planning: what do I want to deliver with this project? The trick here is to be very specific and define in detail what you really want. In the initiation stage you’ve done a lot of thinking about your project. Now it is time to do your first tangible step towards making it a reality: writing down what you (and your team) really want to deliver.

How Do I Want to Deliver?

When reading standard project management methodology, everyone talks about collecting requirements and how they are an important input to your scope plan. But, did you ask yourself: what are requirements really all about?
My best answer would be: writing down how I want to deliver the project. If you think about it, requirements are simply lists with details about the way you want to deliver all the things you just decided about. They include details about how certain things need to look or perform, how some deliverables need to be done so that they comply with important standards, processes or legal requirements, how a few things should not be done, in order to avoid problems, etc.
It is all about how you want to deliver the end result(s) of your project.

Draw IT!

If you have been following this blog for a while, you surely know how much of a WBS (Work Breakdown Structure) fan I am. I really believe there’s a lot of power into drawing things as a way to communicate with yourself and with others. Therefore I would put drawing what you want to deliver as a core project management activity. Even if you don’t draw a typical WBS, and use your own quirky way of drawing what you are about to deliver with your project, there’s still plenty of value into doing it. First, you can start to actually visualize the adventure (project) you are about to embark on and you can explain it easily to others.

What Do You Think?

I’m hopping it all makes sense and that at least some of you agreed with my summary of what scope planning really means. However, I am really curious to find out what you think. Therefore, don’t hesitate to use the comments form below and share your opinion.

Related content:

Stripping Project Management to Its Core: Evaluating Project Risk with a Few Questions
Stripping Project Management to Its Core: Planning What You Need to Get Things Done!
Stripping Project Management to Its Core: Planning Happiness