Understanding the fundamentals of project scope
Tempo Team
Getting a project from conception to execution is a long and tricky process.
You’ll contend with conflicting expectations, changing budgets, and shifting deadlines. And with so much change, it’s easy to go beyond the original proposal and do too much work.
Establishing a firm project scope at the outset helps you dodge time-consuming roadblocks. It documents expectations so stakeholders and team members alike agree on the project’s parameters and don’t go overboard when things change.
What is project scope?
Project scope is the total amount of work necessary to complete an initiative. It’s a collaborative effort involving managers, sponsors, and team members, who together outline the development process and what everyone should reasonably expect from it.
Scoping occurs during the project planning phase, blueprinting its goals, deadlines, and deliverables. The process also defines key stakeholders and potential constraints. The goal is to manage expectations and ensure completion on time and within budget — without overburdening staff with unplanned work.
Project scoping lets you address potential challenges at the outset by:
Ensuring stakeholders’ understanding of details
Managing expectations and securing buy-in
Reducing risk
Permitting accurate budgeting and resource allocation
Aligning outcomes with stakeholder objectives
Establishing a change management process
Preventing scope creep
What is a project scope statement?
A project scope statement is the document you use to formalize the details of your scope. Once your team approves the statement, it establishes boundaries, deliverables, and the expected outcome. Keep this document somewhere accessible where everyone can reference it during development.
Depending on the project’s complexity, you can incorporate the scope statement into a holistic plan or leave it as a stand-alone document. If you’re collaborating with freelancers or vendors, use it as the basis of your contract’s statement of work (SOW). A scope statement also forms the foundation of your work breakdown structure, defining the sub-portions of the project and required tasks.
Most project scope statements include:
Project breakdown: An overview of all work necessary
Constraints: Risks or limitations that might impact delivery
Exclusions: Work that you won’t include
Milestones: Completion dates for specific tasks
Deliverables: Description of the final product or outcome
Acceptance criteria: Standards defining a successful outcome
Change process: How and when adjustments to scope can occur
Sign-off: Standards for when and how a project will close
What is scope creep?
Scope creep happens when new steps, features, or milestones enter a project without authorization or preparation. It adds additional work that strains resources, budgets, and workloads, potentially delaying delivery and degrading output quality.
Some scope creep is acceptable, if it’s within reason. A sudden change in the marketplace might change your goals, adding extra work as your team adjusts. But continuous, unscheduled growth is a project killer because it eats up time and resources you wouldn’t — and shouldn’t — otherwise spend.
Avoid scope creep by:
Involving all stakeholders in the planning process
Defining exclusions in the scope statement
Communicating potential risks and devising mitigation and contingency plans
Instigating a project scope management plan
How to write a project scope statement
Your scope statement will be your North Star, guiding your timeline and the steps you’ll take within it. Clarity and attention to detail are essential, so take your time and don’t skip any steps. Here’s how to write one:
1. Define project objectives
In his book “Let’s Get Real or Let’s Not Play,” Mahan Khalsa makes a strong point by saying: “Unless the problem is fully understood, it will never be solved except by blind luck.”
Consult with stakeholders to decide the goals, objectives, and milestones. You’ll want to outline what assets you’ll deliver upon completion and what the final product should look like. Do this first to make sure all steps lead to your goals.
When you document a problem or a business opportunity, it should be described in terms of the current condition (pre-solution), and its impact on the business. A brief problem statement should accompany each identified need, addressing:
What the result or outcome should be.
What obstacles are preventing this?
How the desired results or outcomes will be measured.
You want to trace problems back to their root cause whenever possible.
2. Review resources
If you haven’t already created a resource management plan, this is the time to itemize which assets are available to complete the project and how to allocate them. You may have to adjust expectations based on availability.
Resources include anything you need to get the job done, which could be:
Budget
Materials
Equipment
Employee bandwidth
3. Collect additional requirements
Assess the project for any additional assumptions or factors that could impact scope. If something affects boundaries, budget, or timelines, identify and include it here. If it seems like you're devoting a lot of time up front, that's a natural reaction.
In his book, Code Complete, Steve McConnell describes the WIMP principle he observed at Microsoft. Whenever managers would see coders in a meeting, they would inevitably ask “Why Isn’t Mark/Mary Programming (WIMP)?”
People hire developers to develop and engineers to engineer solutions. This means that the project manager might have to sell the idea of blocking off time to a scoping phase when it involves dev resources.
While analysis paralysis can get you into trouble, have you ever heard anyone complain that they understood the project scope too well?
4. Draft the project scope statement
Use your research to develop a statement. You can create a simple bulleted list for straightforward projects, but if you’re managing multiple moving parts, consider putting together a complete SOW.
Include constraints, milestones, and deliverables in your outline, along with acceptance criteria that define when the project is over. Your scope statement should clearly state what work it will or will not include and why, leaving no question about rationale and objectives.
5. Seek input and approval – and embrace conflict
Present your draft to stakeholders and team members for review, and assess suggestions and make changes where possible. It’s easier to adjust scope at this stage of the project lifecycle rather than when you’ve already started.
Some people (you know who you are) will do almost anything to avoid conflict. But on a project, the right amount of conflict can actually be a very good thing. Conflict is often the crucible where scope is refined.
Conflict will often happen when you bring stakeholders together in the same room who have differing points of pain surrounding the problem, or different hopes or desires around the opportunity. The good news is that consensus is often cultivated in that same environment. When a project manager or business analyst encounters conflicting perspectives in the same room, job number one is to listen to and facilitate open, direct and honest communication, and to gently guide the group toward consensus.
If there's too much conflict in your scoping process, consider using the Borda method to gather votes for several competing solutions. Voting methods can help quantify how much someone actually cares about a particular feature. Sometimes people don’t really know how much something matters to them until they see the results.
Once you update the scope with potential changes, have stakeholders sign off in support of your plan.
6. Establish change control protocols
Define the change management process in case you do need to adjust the scope once project work begins. The process could be to accept change requests by email or form and ask select team members for approval before implementation. Be sure to review these steps with stakeholders before launch.
7. Communicate project scope statement
Share the finalized statement with stakeholders and the team. Answer any questions and ensure all documentation is easily accessible so team members can refer back to it when necessary. You can also use Gantt charts, Kanban boards, or project management software to illustrate your scope.
8. Refer and review
After launching project development, keep an eye on creep by regularly reviewing progress and comparing it with the scope statement. Any time anyone attempts to introduce change, refer them back to the documentation so they can see if there’s room for adjustment before making a request.
Project scope example
Imagine you’re tasked with populating a blog as part of your client’s content marketing strategy. Your scope statement would look something like this:
1. Introduction
This marketing project will create a library of articles to increase brand awareness, establish authority, and drive traffic to the ecommerce section of the website.
2. Project breakdown
The team is responsible for developing content strategy, content creation, and promotion across company social media channels.
3. Deliverables
The team will launch the blog by completing and publishing the first batch of 10 SEO-optimized articles, each with two stock images, by April 25th.
Once the blog has that foundation of 10 articles, the team will continue to write and publish two new pieces weekly until otherwise stated.
4. Constraints
Possible constraints include:
Redirection of IT team resources that delay the creation of blog site
Editorial delays
Technical difficulties
Budget of $15,000
Timeline of six weeks
5. Exclusions
The team is not responsible for creating custom graphics, nor will the blog posts include multimedia assets.
6. Milestones
Key milestones will include the following:
March 20th: Complete SEO research
March 31st: Deliver content strategy and editorial guidelines to writers
April 10th: Deliver the first round of articles delivered for client review
April 12th: Return articles to writers for potential revisions
April 15th: Complete and return revisions to the client for approval
April 20th: Receive approval
April 23rd: Final review of blog posts
April 25th: Publish first round of blog posts and begin social media promotion
After April 25th, ongoing publishing milestones will include:
Every Monday: Submit two blog posts for editing
Every Wednesday: Submit articles for client approval
Every Thursday: Publish new blog posts and update social media content
7. Acceptance criteria
The team will optimize each blog post for search engines, remove grammatical or spelling errors, and include at least two internal links.
Project scope management
It takes an ongoing effort to manage scope. Without keeping track of your project’s flow, you could run into cost overruns and scope creep. Your statement will help, but you should also:
Establish clear communication channels: Ensure that if someone needs to make changes to scope, you receive the requests promptly.
Identify impacts: Before accepting a change request, understand how it will affect timelines, resources, and deliverables.
Seek approval: Ensure stakeholder support and approval of the scope changes before implementation.
Implement: Once approved, implement and communicate the changes in a timely manner so everyone knows what’s going on.
Think like a customer
There is an important principle in the zeitgeist of project management: The customer is the most important stakeholder. It doesn’t mean that the customer is always right. It just means that the customer’s opinion weighs at least a bit more than anyone else’s.
It’s very easy for project teams to develop a type of tunnel vision around their project and only advocate for their interests; however, the customer needs to have a loud voice. It’s best if the team embraces that early on while keeping the focus on project success.
The project manager has more stakeholders to satisfy than just the customer, including the sponsor, the performing organization and the teams doing the work. However, the customer should always be well-represented throughout the project.
The best tools for project management
Setting and managing project scope is a challenge for any manager. That’s why you need the best tools for the job. Tempo Strategic Roadmaps helps you create roadmaps to implement and track scope changes quickly and easily.
When it comes to resource management, the Tempo Timesheet extension for Jira helps you assess the impact of scope adjustments on your staff and budget by tracking resource hours and conducting a cost analysis using the same tool.
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