Tutorial Week 4

Topic
Project Scope Management

Topic Objectives
By the end of this topic you should be able to:

 Understand the elements that make good project scope management important.
 Discuss the scope definition process and create a work breakdown structure (WBS).
 Understand the importance of scope verification, and change control to avoid scope creep.

Short Answer Questions

1. What is involved in project scope management, and why is good project scope management so important
on information technology projects? Incorporate key themes from this week’s reading by Hooks (1994)
into your response.

2. What is the purpose of a scope statement? Why do you need to have a scope statement if you have a
good project charter?

3. Imagine you are the project manager on a Web development project. The Web site is for a financial
services company that current customers can use to give them advice on financial products and services,
staffing profiles, success stories, links, and various finance calculators. The site will be driven by a back-
end database, and secure logins, and a customer blog amongst other things. The team consists of, you a
web designer, and a web programmer. Key stakeholders include the company CIO, and several finance
specialists. The CIO has indicated the project will bring value to the business, providing an avenue for
information distribution, and enable efficiencies and consistency. You have four months to complete the
project which commences next week. The project budget is $30,000. The CIO would like to see designs,
an alpha and beta prototype and training for staff responsible for maintenance as key deliverables of the
project.

Develop a project scope statement for this project. Use the template below.

Scope Statement

Project Title:
Date: Prepared by:
Project Justification:

.
Product Characteristics and Requirements:
1.
2.
3.

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Tutorial Week 4
4.

Summary of Project Deliverables

Project management-related deliverables: business case, charter, team contract, scope
statement, WBS, schedule, cost baseline, status reports, final project presentation, final project
report, lessons-learned report, and any other documents required to manage the project.
Product-related deliverables: research reports, design documents, software code, hardware,
etc.
1.
2.
3.
4.

Project Success Criteria:

4. Describe four (4) different ways to develop a WBS. Why is it often so difficult to do?

5. Create a WBS in tabular form for the company mentioned in question 3 above.

Corporate guides for creating project WBS’s are to use the five project management process groups as
level 1 headings. Each process group must have at least one major deliverable, and break down the work
to the third level for at least one of the items.

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Case Study

Horror Story

While working at a consulting firm, I witnessed the scope struggles of our sister company during an in-house
development effort to deliver a web-centric desktop environment to users. This project, which began in
earnest about five years ago, followed no project plan and had only a lead developer to guide its progress. It
was started with a handful of talented Java developers who had only the vision of their non-technical
president to guide them.

If this sounds like a nightmare, it was -- and still is. Today, this company has one non-paying client and a
product that was surpassed by competitors two years ago. While it continues to limp along, the company
itself has become unable to pay its employees, is seen as a bottomless money pit by investors, and is still
considered by its management to be a start-up. With no formal project agreement to work from, the scope of
this project changed constantly, even daily, and all efforts, from development to sales and quality assurance,
became stunted by the massive workload and changing vision created?

(Doll, 2001)

6. What is scope creep?

7. W hat do you think the real problem was in this case? Could it have been avoided?

8. Describe four (4) ways scope creep can be avoided?

9. Can scope creep be a good thing? When?

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