Scope Management
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Scope is everything the project will deliver and the work required to deliver it. Scope creep, the gradual, uncontrolled growth of scope, is among the most common reasons projects run late (Kerzner, 2022).
Product Scope and Project Scope
Product scope describes the features and characteristics of the result. Project scope describes the work needed to deliver it. Both must be defined and agreed.
Collecting Requirements
Methods include interviews, workshops, surveys, observation, prototyping, document analysis, and reviewing existing literature. A good requirement is clear, testable, and traceable to a need. Where there are many requirements, prioritize them with a method such as MoSCoW (Must, Should, Could, Won't have this time).
In agile projects, requirements are often written as user stories, such as "As a lab technician, I want to export results as a spreadsheet so that I can share them with the team" (Cohn, 2004).
The Scope Statement
A scope statement lists the objectives, deliverables, acceptance criteria, assumptions, constraints, and, most importantly, the exclusions. Saying clearly what is out of scope protects you later.
The Work Breakdown Structure
The work breakdown structure (WBS) breaks the total scope into smaller and smaller deliverables until each piece can be estimated and assigned. It is the foundation of the schedule, budget, and risk analysis. Rules of thumb:
Organize by deliverables (nouns), not activities (verbs), at the upper levels.
Follow the 100% rule: the WBS must include all the work, and only the work, in the scope.
Break down until work packages are small enough to estimate and track, often a few days to a few weeks of effort.
Give every element a unique code, and add a WBS dictionary describing each work package.
Example: a master's thesis WBS (top levels)
| Code | Deliverable |
| 1 | Project management (plan, meetings, reports) |
| 2 | Literature review |
| 3 | Research design and ethics approval |
| 4 | Data collection |
| 5 | Data analysis |
| 6 | Thesis writing (draft chapters) |
| 7 | Revision, formatting, and submission |
| 8 | Defense preparation |
Validating and Controlling Scope
Validation is formal acceptance of deliverables by the client or supervisor. Control means managing changes through a change process: a request is recorded, its impact on scope, schedule, cost, and risk is assessed, and it is approved or rejected by someone with authority. For a student, "change control" is simply talking to your supervisor before you add a new experiment, a new case, or a new chapter.
Scope in Research
The most common scope problem in research is trying to answer too many questions. A narrower, clearly bounded question that you can finish is nearly always better than a broad one that you cannot. A useful discipline is to keep a "parking lot" list of good ideas for future work, which allows you to defer them without losing them.
CHAPTER 7