Baselining the Scope

Kenneth has 14 years of healthcare experience in government and private industry. Over eight years of experience managing healthcare IT projects, operations, contracts, and personnel. His work experience includes project management, contracts and procurements, data analysis, claims adjudication, business writing, and business process modeling. Kenneth was certified in 2006 as a Project Management Professional.

  Scope Management  

Every project manager has to fight scope creep at some point. Whether it is the customer who just remembered what they really wanted, the software developer who just had a really good idea or just the changing business needs, the scope will begin to creep up. That increased scope causes delays in the schedule, problems with the resources, and no end of headaches to the project manager.

The key to battling this scourge of project management is to baseline the scope at the beginning, but that is easier said than done. Baselining the scope forces people to make decisions, and oftentimes, those are decisions that they don’t really want to make right now. After all, they are just as aware as you are that something is bound to come up that was not thought of in the beginning. So how do you go about baselining the scope?

Define the Scope
You cannot baseline the scope if you do not understand it. This step often includes many meetings among the business owners, the project team and other concerned parties where requirements are discussed, torn apart and discussed all over again. This important phase of the project is not the time for shortcuts or assumptions, this is the time to hash out everything until everyone can be satisfied and sign off on the requirements.

The definitions developed in these meetings and documents are something that the entire project team …

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