Chapter 5 - Project Scope Management
What are the four steps in the nominal group technique?
1. A question or problem is posed to the group. Each person silently generates and writes down their ideas 2. The moderator writes down the ideas on a flip chart until all ideas are recorded 3. Each recorded idea is discussed until all group members have a clear understanding 4. Individuals vote privately to prioritize ideas, usually using a scale of 1 to 5, with 1 being the lowest. 5. After each round, the votes are tallied and the highest scoring ideas are selected.
Typical attributes used in the RTM may include
1. A unique identifier 2. A textual description of the requirements 3. The rationale for inclusion 4. Owner 5. Source 6. Priority 7. Version 8. Current status (such as active, cancelled, deferred, added, approved, assigned, completed) 9. Status date
Tracing requirements includes but is not limited to:
1. Business needs, opportunities, goals and objectives 2. Project objectives 3. Project scope and WBS deliverables 4. Product design 5. Product development 6. Test strategy and test scenarios 7. High-level requirements to more detailed requirements
What are the user stories?
1. Describe the stakeholder role, 2. Who benefits from the feature (role), 3. What the stakeholder needs to accomplish (goal), and 4. the benefit of the stakeholder (motivation)
Trends for project scope management include but are not limited to
1. Determine problem and identify business needs 2. Identify and recommend viable solutions for meeting those needs 3. Elicit, document, and manage stakeholder requirements in order to meet business and project objectives 4. Facilitate the successful implementation of the product, service of the program or project
What are the inputs to the plan scope management process?
1. Develop project charter - documents the project purpose, high-level project description, assumptions, constraints, and high-level requirements that the project is intended to satisfy. 2. Project management plan (a) Quality management plan (b) Project life cycle description - The project life cycle determines the series of phases that a project passes through from its inception to the end of the project. (c) Development approach - defines whether waterfall, iterative, adaptive, agile, or a hybrid development approach will be used. 3. Enterprise environmental factors (a) Organization's culture (b) Infrastructure (c) Marketplace conditions (d) Personnel administration 4. Organizational process asset (a) Policies and procedures (b) Historical information and lessons learned repositories
What are the tools and techniques for the define scope process?
1. Expert judgment 2. Data analysis (a) Alternative analysis 3. Decision making (a) Multicriteria decision analysis - - Uses a decision matrix to provide a systematic analytical approach for establishing criteria, such as requirements, schedule, budget, and resources in order to refine the project and product scope for the project 4. Interpersonal and team skills (a) Facilitation 5. Product analysis - Includes asking questions about a product or service and forming answers to describe the use, characteristics, and other relevant aspects of what is going to be delivered. Examples of product analysis techniques include: (a) Product breakdown (b) Requirements analysis (c) System analysis (d) System engineering (e) Value analysis (f) Value engineering
What are the tools and techniques for collect requirements?
1. Expert judgment (a) Business analysis (b) Requirements elicitation (c) Requirements analysis (d) Requirements documentation (e) Project requirements in previous similar projects (f) Diagramming techniques (g) Facilitation (h) Conflict management 2. Data gathering (a) Brainstorming (b) Interviews (c) Focus groups (d) Questionnaires and surveys (e) Bench-marking - involves comparing actual or planned products, processes, and practices to those of comparable organizations to identify best practices, generate ideas for improvement, and provide a basis for measuring performance. 3. Data analysis (a) Document analysis - consists of reviewing and assessing any relevant documented information. Examples of documents that may be analyzed include (i) Agreements (ii) Business plans (iii) Business process or interface documentation (Iv) Business rules repositories (v) Current process flows (vi) Marketing literature (vii) Problem/issue logs (viii) Policies and procedures (vx) Use cases 4. Decision making (a) Voting - Voting is a collective decision-making technique and an assessment process having multiple alternatives with an expected outcome in the form of future actions. Example of voting techniques include: (i) Unanimity - A decision that is reached whereby everyone agrees on a single course of action (ii) Majority - A decision that is reach with support obtained from more than 50% of the members of the group (iii) Plurality - A decision that is reached whereby the largest block in a group decides, even if a majority is not achieved. Usually used when the number of options nominated is more than two. (b) Autocratic decision making - In this method, one individual takes responsibility for making the decision for the group. (c) Multicriteria decision analysis -A technique that uses a decision matrix to provide a systematic analytical approach for establishing criteria, such as risk levels, uncertainty, and valuation, to evaluate and rank many ideas. 5. Data representation (a) Affinity diagrams - allow large numbers of ideas to be classified into groups for review and analysis. (b) Mind mapping - consolidates ideas created through individual brainstorming sessions into a single map to reflect commonality and differences in understanding and to generate new ideas. 6. Interpersonal and team skills (a) Nominal group technique - enhances brainstorming with a voting process used to rank the most useful ideas for further brainstorming or for prioritization. (b) Observation/conversation (job shadowing) - provide a direct way of viewing individuals in their environment and how they perform their jobs or tasks and carry out processes. (c) Facilitation - used with focused sessions that bring key stakeholders together to define product requirements. Facilitation skills are used in the following situations, but are not limited to: (a) Joint application design/development (JAD) (b) Quality function deployment (c) User stories 7. Context Diagrams - Visually depicts the product scope by showing a business system (process, equipment, computer system, etc.) and how people and other systems (actors) interact with it. 8. Prototypes - A method of obtaining early feedback on requirements by providing a model of the expected product before actually building it (a) Storyboarding
What are the tools and techniques for plan scope management process?
1. Expert judgment (a) Previous similar projects (b) Information in the industry, discipline, and application area 2. Data analysis (a) Alternative analysis 3. Meetings
Solutions requirements are further grouped into two other requirements. What are they?
1. Functional requirements - Describes the behaviors of the product. Examples include actions, processes, data, interactions that the product should execute 2. Nonfunctional requirements - Supplement functional requirements and describe the environmental conditions or qualities required for the product to be effective
Because each project is unique, the project manager will need to tailor the way Project Scope Management processes are applied. Considerations for tailoring include but are not limited to:
1. Knowledge and requirements management - Does the organization have formal or informal knowledge and requirements management systems? What guidelines should the project manager establish for requirements to be reused in the future? 2. Validation and control - Does the organization have existing formal or informal validation and control-related policies, procedures, and guidelines? 3. Development approach - Does the organization use agile approaches in managing projects? Is the development approach iterative or incremental? Is a predictive approach used? Will a hybrid approach be productive? 4. Stability of requirements - Are there areas of the project with unstable requirements? Do unstable requirements necessitate the use of lean, agile, or other adaptive techniques until they are stable and well defined? 5. Governance - Does the organization have a formal or informal audit and governance policies, procedures, and guidelines?
The project scope management processes include?
1. Plan scope management 2. Collect requirements (repeated in adaptive project life cycle) 3. Define scope (repeated in adaptive project life cycle) 4. Create WBS (repeated in adaptive project life cycle) 5. Validate Scope 6. Control Scope
In the project context, the term "scope" can refer to
1. Product scope 2. Project scope
What does requirements mean?
Defined as a condition or capability that is required to be present in a product, service, or result to satisfy an agreement or other formally imposed specification
What are the inputs for collect requirements?
1. Project charter 2. Project management plan. Components include (a) Scope management plan - The scope management plan contains information on how the project scope will be defined and developed. (b) Requirements management plan - The requirements management plan has information on how project requirements will be collected, analyzed, and documented. (c) Stakeholder engagement plan - used to understand stakeholder communication requirements and the level of stakeholder engagement in order to assess and adapt to the level of stakeholder participation in requirements activities. 3. Project documents (a) Assumption log - Used to identify assumptions about the product, project, environment, stakeholders, and other factors that can influence requirements. (b) Lesson learned register - The lessons learned register is used to provide information on effective requirements collection techniques, especially for projects that are using an iterative or adaptive product development methodology. (c) Stakeholder register - used to identify stakeholders who can provide information on the requirements. 4. Business documents (a) Business case - Describes required, desired, and optional criteria for meeting the business needs 5. Agreements 6. Enterprise environmental factors (a) Organization's culture (b) Infrastructure (c) Personnel administration (d) Marketplace conditions 7. Organizational process assets (a) Policies and procedures (b) Historical information and lessons learned repository with information from previous projects
What are the inputs to the define scope process?
1. Project charter - Provides the high-level project description, product characteristics, and approval requirements 2. Project management plan (a) Scope management plan - Documents how the project scope will be defined, validated, and controlled 3. Project documents (a) Assumption logs - Identifies assumptions and constraints about the product, project, environment, stakeholders, and other factors, that can influence the project and product scope (b) Requirements documentation - Identifies requirements that will be incorporated into the scope (c) Risk register - Contains response strategies that may affect the project scope, such as reducing or changing project and product scope to avoid or mitigate a risk 4. Enterprise environmental factors (a) Organization's culture (b) Infrastructure (c) Personnel administration (d) Marketplace conditions 5. Organizational process assets (a) Policies, procedures, and templates for a project scope statement (b) Lessons learned from previous phases or projects (c) Project files from previous projects
What are the outputs of the define scope process?
1. Project scope statement - The description of the project scope, major deliverables, assumptions, and constraints. The detailed project scope statement, either directly or by reference to other documents include the following: (a) Product scope description - Progressively elaborates the characteristics of the product, service, or result described in the project charter and requirements documentation (b) Deliverables - Any unique and verifiable product, result, or capability to perform a service that is required to be produced to complete a process, phase, or project. Also includes ancillary results such as project management reports and documentation (c) Acceptance criteria - A set of conditions that is required to be met before deliverables are accepted (d) Project exclusions - Identifies what is excluded from the project 2. Project documents update (a) Assumption logs - Updated with additional assumptions that were identified in this process (b) Requiremens documentation (c) Requirements traceability matrix (d) Stakeholder register
What are the outputs of collect requirements?
1. Requirements documentation (A project document) - describes how individual requirements meet the business need for the project. Requirements can be grouped into classifications allowing for further refinement and detail as the requirements are elaborated. These classifications include (a) Business requirements - These describe the higher-level needs of the organization as a whole, such as business issues or opportunities, and reasons why a project has been undertaken (b) Stakeholder requirements - Describes the needs of a stakeholder or stakeholder group (c) Solution requirements - Describes features, functions, and characteristics of the product, service, or result that will meet the business and stakeholder requirements. (d) Transition and readiness requirements - These describe temporary capabilities, such as data conversion and training requirements, needed to transition from the current as-is state to the desired future state (e) Project requirements - These describe the actions, processes, or other conditions the project needs to meet (f) Quality requirements - These capture any condition or criteria needed to validate the successful completion of a project deliverable or fulfillment of other project requirements 2. Requirements traceability matrix - A grid that links product requirements from their origin to the deliverables that satisfy them Provides a means to track requirements throughout the project life cycle.
What are the outputs for the plan scope management process?
1. Scope management plan. The components of the scope management plan include: (a)Process for preparing a project scope statement (b) Process that enables the creation of the WBS from the detailed project scope statement (c) Process that establishes how the scope baseline will be approved and maintained (d) Process that specifies how formal acceptance of the completed project deliverables will be obtained 2. Requirements management plan - a component of the project management plan that describes how project and product requirements will be analyzed, documented, and managed. Components include: (a) How requirements activities will be planned, tracked, and reported (b) Configuration management activities such as: how changes will be initiated; how impacts will be analyzed; how they will be traced, tracked, and reported; as well as the authorization levels required to approve these changes (c) Requirements prioritization process (d) Metrics that will be used and the rationale for using them (e) Traceability structure that reflects the requirement attributes captured on the traceability matrix
Additional attributes to ensure that the requirements on the RTM has met stakeholders satisfaction may include
1. Stability 2. Complexity 3. Acceptance criteria
What is storyboarding?
A prototyping technique showing sequence or navigation through a series of images or illustrations In software development, storyboards use mock-ups to show navigation paths through web pages, screens, or other user interfaces
What is Quality function deployment (QFD)
Helps determine critical characteristics for new product development Starts by collecting customer needs, also known as "voice of the customer (VOC)". These are then objectively sorted and prioritized and goals are set for achieving them
What is the key benefit of define scope process?
It describes the product, service, or result boundaries and acceptance criteria
What is the key benefit to the plan scope management process?
It provides guidance and direction on how the scope will be managed throughout the project
What is the key benefit of collect requirements process?
It provides the basis for defining the product scope and project scope
What is product scope?
The features and functions that characterize a product, service, or result
What is plan scope management?
The process of creating a scope management plan that documents how the project and product scope will be defined, validated, and controlled
What is Collect Requirements?
The process of determining, documenting, and managing stakeholder needs and requirements to meet project objectives
What is define scope?
The process of developing a detailed description of the project and product
What is validate scope?
The process of formalizing acceptance of the completed project deliverables
What is control scope?
The process of monitoring the status of the project and product scope and managing changes to the scope baseline.
What is create WBS?
The process of subdividing project deliverables and project work into smaller, more manageable components
What is project scope?
The work performed to deliver a product, service, or result with the specified features and functions
What is Joint application design/development (JAD)?
These facilitated sessions focus on bringing business SME's and the development team together to gather requirements and improve the software development process Mainly used in the software development industry
Managing the project scope is primarily concerned with what?
defining and controlling what is and is not included in the project.
What is project scope management?
includes the processes required to ensure that the project includes all the work required, and only the work required, to complete the project successfully.
