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The Project Scope Statement
What is the project scope statement? It is probably one of the most important documents that you’ll find in your project management plan for a couple of reasons.
The project scope statement is the description of the project scope, and the description of the major deliverables that we’ll be delivering as part of this project. It includes any assumptions that we have made in the idea of finding the scope, and also any constraints that we know about.
It’s a really clear picture of what we’re going to be doing as part of our project. The detailed project scope statement includes these things:
The scope description, which is progressively elaborated. That means we could iteratively improve this as time goes on. We might find more items here or there and ultimately then we’ll have our scope statement, but we will have iteratively worked on it and improved on it over time.
Once it gets to a certain stage that we’re happy with, and our stakeholders are happy to lock that in its locked in as a baselined document, which means that any future changes need to go through an official change control process, usually signed off by the project sponsor.
We have the project deliverables, so what are we actually delivering? The acceptance criteria – what is the definition of done for these particular deliverables? How do we know when they’re complete?
Then any exclusions that we have in that scope. Maybe we’re not delivering a certain part, and defining that upfront really helps us so that we don’t have any scope creep as that project goes along.
Now why are we creating this? The scope statement basically enables a product team to perform more detailed planning on the scope, and it guides the project team’s work during the execution of the project. It provides the Baseline once we’ve locked it in, for evaluating whether requests for changes or additional work are contained within or outside of the projects boundaries. You will see this a lot in your project management career.
In any project there are many different stakeholders. If you have a baselined scope statement and all of a sudden a customer or a stakeholder says “I really want this item, and I want this item too,” if we’ve got a really solid scope statement so we know what is in scope and what’s out of scope then we can say “Yes, we can definitely work on this piece, maybe we can even work on this piece, but this one is specifically excluded.”
If you want to make a change, you have to raise that change request and go through our configuration management process. That is why it’s so important to have a project scope statement and work with that as we’re going along on our project.
– David McLachlan