Effective Project Management: Traditional, Agile, Extreme, Sixth Edition

Using Tools, Templates, and Processes to Scope a Project

The effective scoping of a project is as much an art as it is a science. A number of tools, templates, and processes can be used during the scoping effort, and they are all precisely defined and documented in this chapter. That is the science of scoping. Knowing your client, your organization's environment, and the market situation and how to adapt the tools, templates, and processes to them is part of the art of scoping. Virtually all of the scoping effort involves an interaction and collaboration between the client who is requesting a service or product and the project manager who is providing the service or product. That collaboration can be very informal (the “back of the napkin” approach) or very formal (a planned Scoping Meeting). In both cases, a document is prepared that answers the questions: “What do you need to do?” and “How will you know you did it?” The nature of that relationship will contribute to how the scoping effort proceeds and how successful it is likely to be.

The following tools, templates, and processes are described in this chapter:

• Conditions of Satisfaction
• Project Scoping Meeting
• Requirements decomposition
• Facilitated group sessions
• Diagramming business processes
• Prototyping
• Use cases
• Project Overview Statement
• Approval to plan the project