How to Scope a Project

Introduction

Properly scoping a project can help keep the project from blowing up in your face, making you look bad in front of your co-workers and the project's stakeholders, and potentially losing your job. The biggest components of scoping a project are determining what assets will be included in the project, building a realistic project schedule and determining the project's budget. You should also always be working to avoid scope creep, which can turn any project into a nightmare.

Call a Stakeholder Meeting

Call a meeting and involve all of the stakeholders for a project. Project stakeholders include any of the primary parties who put together the project and those who will be overseeing it and working on it, excluding vendors. Hold an open discussion about what everyone's goals for the project are, what assets will be required to build the project, how they envision the final project, what they feel is a proper timeline for building the project, what vendors, if any, should be involved and how much they think the project will cost. Even if this is a discussion meeting where people can throw out ideas and thoughts regarding the project, there are a lot of topics that need to be covered and ideas that need to be thrown around. As a result, it's best to hold this kind of meeting with as many stakeholders physically in the room as possible. If you have to, you can have this kind of discussion in a conference call, but you should never try conducting this kind of meeting over e-mail. Additionally, don't outright reject anyone's thoughts in any area if you feel something is unattainable. Instead, use due diligence and come back to that person later with research that supports why that approach isn't best and some possible alternatives. You'll use the resulting discussion in this meeting to start scoping your project.

Project Assets

Determine what assets are necessary to build the project and create a list of those assets and have all of the stakeholders sign off on it. For example, if you're overseeing the development of a website, determine what will be on it, such as videos, flash content, games, interactive content and so on. If you're overseeing a construction project, you may need to determine how long you'll need to rent construction equipment. After all of the stakeholders sign off on the required assets, proceed with developing a schedule and requesting a budget.

Schedule

Build a realistic schedule and have all of the stakeholders sign off on it. Don't shortchange yourself or anyone who's working on the project, such as vendors, with regard to the time it takes to work on something. Tightening a schedule or omitting steps sacrifices the integrity of the project that can create bigger problems down the line, potentially leading to the project being scrapped altogether and, if things get bad enough, you losing your job. If a project is behind schedule before it starts, build an honest schedule and pass it along to the stakeholders, explaining why the project will finish late. Also, give the stakeholders some options to pull the project back on track or get it closer to the actual target completion date.

Cost

Work to project the total project costs to the best of your ability, add 20 percent to that total and then have the project owner sign off on it. If you have no idea what the cost to build the project could be, submit some request for proposals to the vendors you're considering using to do that work and use the highest bid when projecting the development cost of a project, just in case. Between the extra 20 percent and factoring in the highest possible costs to have the work done, you should have plenty of money to cover the project's expenses, and even deal with unexpected costs associated with assets you factored in and even those that sneak in as a result of scope creep, which occurs when the original scope of your project expands slowly over the life of the project and can even result in a scope change, which occurs when you need to call all of the stakeholders together and revisit the scope of the project.

Avoiding Scope Creep

Scope creep can slowly consume and kill your project if you don't acknowledge it and reign it in. If you feel the scope of the project expanding to fast or like it could reach a point where it could affect either the project's schedule or budget, call a status meeting and invite all of the stakeholders to discuss the schedule and budget, and whether changes need to be made in these areas to accommodate the growth of the project and to keep the scope components realistic. For more information about dealing with a change in the scope of your project, check out the following article: How to Deal with a Change in Scope.