Less Well-Known Benefits of Scope Management

Scope management is all about ensuring your project produces what is required — and only what is required — to satisfy project objectives. It also delivers additional benefits you don’t often hear about:

Helps manage risk. Talk to an experienced project manager and you’ll likely hear a hard-earned lesson: the bigger your project, the riskier it becomes. For initiatives that require a lot of organizational change and project deliverables, you can break down scope into phases to make things more manageable. This breakdown into smaller chunks reduces risk and makes it easier for the organization to absorb the changes because they are applied in progressive steps. In many respects, the most effective way to manage project risk is to work closely with your stakeholders to manage scope.

Expands understanding of business requirements. Scope management is best performed through conversation. And conversation not only helps the project team understand business needs, but also helps the business recognize what is straightforward and what is difficult for the project team to produce.

In addition, good scope management means prioritizing requirements. This helps the project team understand what’s vital to the business and can enhance the business’s perspective on its own requirements! So, the business and the project team are better positioned to produce what’s most important, reducing scope and risk.

Builds confidence in the project. Detailed conversations about scope, including well-crafted questions to gain detailed understanding of business needs, can help build stakeholder confidence in the project team’s ability to meet its objectives. Good questions that inspire analysis and understanding of business needs can build trust that the project team knows what needs to be done. And starting off a project with trust from business stakeholders is a big plus.

Helps adapt to available resources. Skill shortages are everywhere and have been amplified by the impacts of the Covid pandemic. Scope management helps everyone be realistic about what can and cannot be done. Discussions about available skills help craft a realistic project schedule. Scope and resource management drive productive discussions about prioritizing work, particularly for scarce resources. The earlier these conversations and prioritizations are made and understood, the easier it will be to build a sound schedule and proceed through the project lifecycle.

Have you obtained other benefits from scope management? If so, share them with us in the comment section.

For more about scope management, check out my Project Management Foundations course.

Coming Up

Don’t miss Bonnie’s first LinkedIn Office Hours session of 2022, Leadership is Job One for Project Managers, at 1pm MT, January 25, 2022. Bonnie and bestselling project management author Eric Verzuh will talk about how shifting your focus to project leadership has a direct impact on project value. Bring your project management questions to this session.