Do You Know Where Your Scope Is?

William Duncan - October 1, 2009

Bill is President, Project Management Partners in Lexington, Mass., and is a consultant and trainer.

Change Management Requirements Management Work Breakdown Structures (WBS) ProjectsAtWork

Everyone seems to agree on the importance of scope, but there is much less agreement on what it is and where to find it. By focusing on a project’s “product” (whether tangible or intangible), project managers create greater clarity around the implication of all changes.

What could be more basic to the practice of project management than an understanding of scope? Scope determines the project’s boundaries: what’s in, what’s out. Everyone seems to understand that a scope change will usually affect both cost and schedule. When a project fails, in whole or in part, poorly defined or poorly understood scope is almost always identified as a key contributor.

But while everyone seems to agree on the importance of scope, there is substantially less agreement on what it is and still less on where to find it.

What is scope?

In searching both the web and the printed project management literature, I found three schools of thought:

School #1 says that scope is defined by the description of the product of the project. Most of the advocates for this position seemed to represent project roles involved with deciding what these specifications should be, e.g., business owners, project sponsors, architects, and designers.

School #2 maintains that scope is defined by the work…

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Do You Know Where Your Scope Is?

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