Defining the project scope: why is it important?
The project scope is part of the project planning phase and involves defining the specific project goals, deliverables, tasks, costs and deadlines/timeline – explaining the project boundaries as well as establishing the team members responsible for each task.
What’s more, the project scope defines the expectations, project processes and procedures for how completed work will be signed off.
Here, we’ll explore the importance of defining the project scope.
The importance of defining the project scope
Defining the project scope comes with many benefits to PMO Leads, key stakeholders and project teams, including:
- Providing all stakeholders with a deeper understanding of what’s involved
- Providing a detailed roadmap of the project that managers can use to assign tasks, budget and schedule work within an appropriate timeline
- Helping all project teams understand project objectives and work productively towards a common goal
- Ensuring your project is executed to expectation from the very beginning
- Preserving and adequately allocating resources
- Reducing the risk of ‘scope-creep’
Creating the project scope
When creating the project scope, you will need input from stakeholders and Project Managers; all working together to establish the key elements of the project such as the budget, objectives and timeline/deadlines.
As such, to determine scope Project Managers must have an understanding of what the stakeholders need from the project, including:
- The project objective and deliverables
- The project deadline
- The project budget
And ensuring this is included in the project scope, alongside guidelines for making decisions about change requests during the project, as well as establishing what is and isn’t included in its initiatives.
In short, the project scope leads and informs the project planning phase which is arguably the most important phase of your project; getting this right, therefore, is imperative to a well-executed project.
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