Lessons Learned Journal Number 3

For my third lessons learned journal, I’m going to be talking about the fifth chapter in project management, which involves talking about scope management. Scope management is basically what it sounds like, which is managing the scope of a project, and doing so effectively. The scope of a project has to be managed effectively, otherwise there will be constant changes and problems with the scope, which will cause problems because of what’s known as the triple constraint. The triple constraint says that for one thing in a project to change, something else has to. In this case, if the scope is changed and nothing else is, this could cause the project to fail.

There are a couple of things  to keep in mind when talking about scope management, and they are:

• Determining requirements
• Controlling scope
• Understanding a work breakdown structure
• Understanding a work package

After getting into the introduction of scope management, and what it is, we begin to learn about something called the work breakdown structure, or WBS.  The work breakdown structure is basically a grouping of all the work that needs to be done in a project, and in the end, covers everything about the scope of the project. While the work breakdown structure is fairly new to me, I do think that it’s a great idea, and I can’t imagine anyone knowing about this and not having a reason to implement it!

Work breakdown structure- Has four methods:

1. Analogy– Taking the work breakdown structures of other projects or organizations, and using them as a guideline for your WBS.
   
2. Top-down– Starting with the largest items of a project, and breaking them down.
3. Bottom-up– Exact opposite as the top-down method. Start with the smaller items, and work your way up.
4. Mind-mapping– Writing the tasks in a non-linear, branching format.
   

These methods are all viable methods of doing a work breakdown structure, however, I find the top-down method to be the easiest, mostly because you’re simply listing all of your big things in your project, and breaking a big thing down into something smaller is much easier than starting with nothing and working your way up.

After talking about the work breakdown structure, we started to talk about a work package, as well as a change control procedure, and a deliverable.

Work package–  Something that can be described and defined on one page. Can be assigned to a group of people/individual and that person/group is left responsible.

Change control procedure– Must be submitted in order to make any changes, as a result of scope control.

A deliverable is a product produced as part of a project. Ex. Hardware, software, or planning documents.

All of these three terms are fairly new to me, but I learned a deliverable is something that the project produces, and of course, is very important to a project. The change control procedure makes sense, because without a change control procedure, scope creep would simply ruin the project.

Scope creep– Adding additional, non-required items or steps to the scope, generally causing the project to fail due to time issues.

After these definitions, we then learned about the project scope management process, which has five steps which work towards the success of the project scope management process.

Project scope management process- Involved five steps:

1. Scope Planning– Decide how the scope will be defined, verified, and controlled.
2. Scope Verification– Formalizing acceptance of the project scope.
3. Scope Control– Controlling changes to the scope of the project.
4. Scope Definition– Reviewing the project charter and preliminary scope statement, and adding more information as requirements.
5. Creating the WBS– Diving the major project deliverables into smaller components.

Work Breakdown Structure (WBS)- A deliverable-oriented grouping of the work involved in a project that defines the total scope of the project. Example below, organized by product:

And organized by phase:

Gantt Chart– A chart used to show the work breakdown structure, and schedules the work breakdown structure by people, dates, and specific tasks.

Approaches to developing WBS’s:

• Guidelines– Another organization providing guidelines for you for preparing the WBS.
• Analogy approach– Review WBS’s of similar projects and tailor to your project.
• Top-down approach– Start with the largest items of the project, and break them down.
• Bottom-up approach– Start with the specific tasks and roll them up.
• Mind-mapping approach– Write tasks in non-linear, branching format, and then create the WBS structure.

Now I know we talked about this earlier, but the approaches from earlier included only four methods, but this example we learned later on includes five.

WBS Dictionary– A document that describes detailed information about each WBS item.

The project scope statement, the WBS, and the WBS dictionary are combined to form the scope baseline. The scope baseline is used to measure the performance in meeting project scope goals.

Scope control– Involves controlling changes to the project scope.

Variance– The difference between planned and actual performance.

Overall, the fifth chapter was a fairly short chapter compared to the first two I talked about, but I still felt like I learned a lot, and it’s gotten me excited about the chapters to come, as the information seems very relevant, and I think it will help me greatly in the future!