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Creating the Project Scope

1. Planning the project scope

In an earlier session, we talked about the process of defining the project scope. And there are some very specific tools and techniques that you could use in order to create that scope statement. And it's important to look at some of these tools, as you may encounter these on your exam. So I want to walk through these. Now, the first one we saw was product analysis. Product analysis is where, if we're building some piece of equipment, we take that equipment and break it down to the individual components that would equate to the sum of those that would equate to this device. So for example, like in this drawing here, let's say this is a new piece of a computer, some type of fancy router or a printer, or who knows? But the idea here is, in this schematic, we're looking at just one very particular portion of the piece. So let's take a look at that here. So, in the product breakdown, we're looking at just this one very specific component out of everything in this computer printer or whatever network building we're doing. so that this component is part of the product breakdown. Then we'd take this piece out and figure out what we need to do to create that thing in our scope, then move this chunk back over here, and so on. So the product breakdown is kind of an arithmetic of what we are creating, and that helps us create our scope. You may also see this as systems engineering. So it's just a couple of different ways of looking at the product scope—the thing that we are creating—and then that helps us create the project scope. Now, with product analysis, there are a couple of different terms here with product analysis.Value engineering is where we look at the value of the product. So how can we cut costs while maintaining value? So for example, we may have a phone case that is so many millilitres thick of material, and through our testing we found that we could shave off 1 millilitre of material. We can make it just a little thinner, and it wouldn't have any effect on the end result. And over time, that tiny difference in taking off that material saves us a quarter per piece or what have you. So value engineering is: how can we cut costs but still maintain value? It's a little different than value analysis, where the cost of the product can be no greater than what's necessary to achieve value. So we look at all of the parts that go into the product and see how much they cost and how that equates to value for the customer. If we're spending more than what that value is worth, then we are going to be upside down on our profit, obviously. So value analysis says the cost of the product can be no greater than what's necessary to achieve value. And if we're adding things that don't add value, it's a non-value value add.So you've most likely heard that phrase before. Function analysis is primarily used in system functions or functional architecture. It's, "What does this thing do?" What does this right click do? What does this field do? And how does it contribute to the scope? How does it contribute to the project deliverables? Quality function deployment, sometimes called the voice of the customer, is a structured approach to defining customer needs. It's really looking at the product and saying, "How will the customer use what we're creating?" What is their value, and what are we creating for them? Is it the reliability, is it the sturdiness of the product, or is it the price? Or is it probably a combination of those things? So that's quality function deployment. You've seen this term a couple of different times, "alternative generation." So there are some flavours here, like benchmarking, where you compare one product to another, like Oracle versus SQL, or wood versus carpet, or what have you there.So systems, vendors, materials, resources—these are all things that you can find alternatives for, and that's alternative generation. So there's always a different solution for what you may have to deliver. In your project-facilitated workshops, you've seen this a couple of times now. It's a way of understanding stakeholder expectations and documenting requirements. Documenting expectations also allows you to communicate those requirements and what's in scope, allowing you to seek verification that the customer agrees that what you're about to create is truly what's out there for the deliverable. Now, you may do this as a project manager; maybe a business analyst would do this for you or before the project even gets started.

2. Understanding project requirements

So you're the project manager of a new project to construct a warehouse for a large distributor in your city. How will you know exactly what that customer wants your project to do? What do they want you to create? Requirements come from stakeholders. So the customer, the person you're building this warehouse for, is going to tell you what they want, and you're going to ask questions. So requirements, or the process of gathering or identifying requirements, aid in the development of the scope. So let's look at some approaches here. These are some of the activities you will engage in to gather requirements. Well, first off, you interview the stakeholders. You've got to get out and talk to your stakeholders. You can go to your stakeholder register, and that will tell you who your stakeholders are. Or sometimes it will be very obvious to your customer. And then your customer may tell you who exactly to speak to about the requirements. When you interview stakeholders, there are three different approaches here.You can have a one-to-one conversation, or you can have a one-to-many conversation, where it's just you and you're talking to two or three people from the project stakeholder group. So whether it be the customers or people within your organisation or what have you, it's one too many. So you're talking to many people at once, like in a meeting. And then you might also have a mini-tomini, where you might be the project manager. And you also bring your senior engineer and your junior engineer and the scheduler, and so on. So there's lots of peopleinvolved asking questions and clarity. But it's all the same here. You're just trying to elicit requirements from your stakeholders. You want to know what they expect from the project? In order for the project to be successful, depending on the type of project you're doing, you might have a focus group. A focus group is a moderated event, typically with six to twelve people max.And you might hire someone to be a neutral moderator to get opinions from the customers and from the people that are stakeholders in your project. Sometimes you see this in businesses where they want to release a new product. So they might have a new service, or maybe a restaurant has a new item on their menu, and they bring people in to try this new dish. So the neutral moderator would do the conferencing, ask questions, and get feedback. And the reason why it's neutral is because you don't want the people who are part of the focus group to be influenced by their opinion. Because you're the project manager, they may not be as honest with you as they would with this third party. The last point here is participant composition. So let's say that you have a project and are going to replace all of the laptops in your company. So everyone gets a new laptop. 1000 people are going to get a new laptop. If you went to all the executives and had a focus group with them, they would probably have different concerns, thoughts, and input on project requirements than if you went to all the people who were the graphic artists and designers, because how they use that laptop is obviously going to be entirely different. So, based on your participant composition, maybe you do want to segment your audience by how they'll use the solution. Or you could do just the opposite. You could gather a few people from the executives, salespeople, graphic designers, and so on to form a group of people from all over the country. So that's what a focus group is, and pay attention to that idea of participant composition. There are pros and cons to each. Now sometimes, especially when you're developing a piece of software, you might use a facilitated workshop. Often, in this workshop, everyone who is part of the project requirements will leave the company. They're going to go off site to a resort somewhere or go to a conference room at a hotel, and they're going to spend a day or two and just really zoom in on what this project should create. And so it's just really intense hands-on conversations and work about building the requirements. And so the idea is that when you come out of that workshop, you have all of the requirements defined, and everyone has some consensus on what these requirements are. Sometimes it's called the Joint Application Design Workshop; it might also be known as the voice of the customer. And then the voice of the customer is sometimes linked to what's called the "quality function deployment." But these are all facilitated workshops. I wouldn't worry too much about the differences between each of these. The goal is all the same: to have an intense session on creating the requirements. Another way to create some requirements is through group creativity techniques. And you probably know this best as brainstorming, where a group of people get together and just throw out all sorts of wild ideas. No limit, nothing's off the wall, no judgment; just throw out ideas and we'll see what happens, and then we can sort those out later. Now, another approach is called the nominal group technique. The nominal group technique is where it's like brainstorming. But as people throw out ideas, we begin to sort out the different ones into common groups. So you might say, okay, we're only going to talk about hardware right now. We're only going to brainstorm on hardware, and then we'll brainstorm on the network, and then we're going to brainstorm on software, and so on. So that's the nominal group technique. Mind mapping is a technique for generating ideas. And one thing that you draw may help you trigger an idea somewhere else in your mind. And so it's just a way of visualising what the requirements are as you are working through this process of requirement gathering. Now an affinity diagram is where, like the nominal group technique, you are focusing on just certain portions of the project. So again, like hardware, software, and so on, But as ideas come up, you begin to sort them according to where they fall into these different categories. So that's an affinity diagram because they have an affinity to have some lightness toward one another. Now, the Delphi Technique is where you use rounds of anonymous surveys to build consensus. So these surveys are anonymous. So let's think about this. We have five or six people in this meeting; let's say we have six people in this meeting, and I'm in this meeting and you're in this meeting, and you are my boss. And people are asking, well, what are the requirements? What do we need in this software that would be really good? Well, I think it's really important that people can save as a PDF, but you, my boss, don't like that idea. And I know you're not a fan of anything that can be saved as a PDF. So if I blurt that out right now, oi, you may not be very happy with me. So what the Dellify Technique does is allow me to anonymously say we need PDF capabilities, and you don't know that I'm the one who said it. So then, for the people running this Delphi Technique session, it could be like an email or it could be a physical survey. They collect all those surveys together, and they tabulate what the requirements are. So they start with the least popular and send that out to all the participants, those five or six people, and then those folks can talk about it. So you'll see in the survey too that I said—you won't know it's me, but you'll see that someone said we should have PDF capabilities. And then you can say, "Well, PDF is this and this and this, and I don't like it." And then all of those surveys go together, the answers are compiled, and on and on it goes. It doesn't have to be four surveys. It could be 15 surveys. But it goes through these rounds of anonymous surveys until eventually we have some consensus on what the requirements are. Now it's called the Delphi Technique because it's named after the Oracle at Delphi. So there are some legends there that the Delphic people were able to see into the future, and they had the oracle that was able to see into the future and could give some advice and help counsel people as they came with questions. So that's why it's called the Delphi Technique. Group decisions. You need to know this information about group decisions. The first one here is unanimity, or "unanimous," where everyone agrees. Then we have the majority, where more than 50% agree, and then we have the plurality, where the largest block agrees. So for example, we could say, "All right, we're going to have a party, and at this party, we could have pizza, we could have tacos, or we could have a cheese plate." Well, because we have three different choices. Let's say that there are 100 people and 40 people say, "Oh, we want pizza." And then of the remaining 60 people, 30 say they don't want any; we want a cheese plate, and the other 30 say we want tacos. Well, we have more people voting for pizza than we do for the other choices. But if you put the number of people who want tacos and cheese plates together, there are 60 people who would rather have something else than have pizza. So if the largest block agrees, that's the decision we go for. So we're going to get pizza now. The dictatorship is where power decides where the CEO comes in and says, "No, this is what we're doing; go do it." It could also be like "senior engineer" or something like that. That doesn't have to be the CEO, but it could be someone who has the authority within the project or has the most experience or perceived power, where they just say, "This is what we're going to do." Not a very friendly way to make decisions. Sometimes you use questions and surveys. It doesn't have to be like the Delphi technique, but if you have a very large group and you want their opinion about project requirements, a survey is a great way to do this. Of course, you could do a paper-based survey. It's becoming more and more common, like SurveyMonkey or some other piece of software where you could do a web-based survey. It also eliminates the idea of geographical concerns to do this electronically because we can ask people from all over the world to participate in this survey. But it's just another example of how you can go about defining requirements for your project.

3. Exploring project constraints

This lecture deals with project constraints. Constraints are anything that will limit your options as a project manager. So let's be more specific. Think about what the constraints are. Obviously, it's anything that limits your options, but it also describes things like deadlines, maybe a predetermined budget, materials, resources such as specific people, the project deliverables as a constraint, and any other requirements that you have in your project. So imagine you're working on a project like the one we saw in the video, where you're installing a new server and a data warehouse.Well, you may have a deadline. It has to be done by the end of the year. Your budget is constrained; you cannot spend more than $300,000 on materials, such as a specific type of cable resource.You have three senior engineers for your project and two junior engineers with whom you must use project deliverables. There are specs for the server that you have to set up on what type of operating system it is, what the hardware specs are, and so on. So there are the project deliverables, and then there are some other requirements. So we have some key performances here. There has to be speed, bandwidth, and throughput reliability. So there are some other requirements that affect the acceptability of the project, and that would be a constraint. So, it's really anything that limits your options. Now, there are always three constraints that you have in project management. They're called the "triple constraints of project management," and they are time, cost, and scope. Sometimes these are shown like the "Iron Triangle." The iron triangle is an equilateral triangle where all three sides are equal. And so if you imagine each side, there is time, another is cost, and another is scope. If any one of those sides is out of balance, then your project probably isn't going to be successful. So if you have a very large scope but not a lot of money and not a lot of time, that's just not feasible. It's not going to be successful. This is a mistake that some project managers make: they overpromise on how quickly they can get something done because they want to please the customer or they are eager to get to work. And when you overpromise on how quickly or how little something costs or how long something takes, if it's not reflective of what the scope is, the project is not going to be balanced. So you have to balance time, cost, and scope. And this will be part of our scope management planning, as well as our scope definition.And then in future sessions, we'll talk about time, how you estimate time, and also how you estimate cost. So this is setting us up here for time, cost, and scope, and the iron triangle. Now, if we have constraints, we may also have assumptions. Assumptions are anything you believe to be true but have yet to prove.All projects have some assumptions. So, for example, you may have an assumption that your project team is not going to quit the company, or you may have an assumption that the project sponsor is going to support the project, or you may have an assumption that the stakeholders want the project. If we don't test those assumptions, we assume that the vendor will deliver on time or that the team has the necessary skill set.If we don't prove that, assumptions can become a risk. So risk and assumptions are often linked together. We also have some assumptions, and constraints and assumptions are often linked. So we have an assumption that our estimates were correct. We might have an assumption that the scope is not going to change, or we might have an assumption that if the scope changes, we'll get more money or get more time. So assumptions and constraints kind of follow you around in the project. You have to make some assumptions, but we also have to be really careful about those assumptions. Will they come back and create a risk in our project?

4. Dealing with tiered requirements

There's a very easy topic that I want youto grasp here and you might see it acouple of times throughout the remainder of our courseand you might see it on your CAPM exam. But it's a very simple concept of managing tiered requirements. So let's take a look at what the tiered requirements are. Tiered requirements are where I have different levels of requirements. Sometimes they're conditional or situational requirements, or they'll be stated as "if then" requirements. So you could think of tiered requirements as having a top level of mandatory and a kind of second level that if we have time or money or a third level that if we can get this, it's fine. So tiered requirements are just a way of stating that you have some different levels of requirements based on conditions that happen within the project. Here are some very common examples, which you have most likely used in your career. You have to have requirements where the deliverable must have a two-car garage. A should-have requirement is that the garage floor should be coated and sealed. A nice to have requirement would be that the garage door is the opener, as it can be keyed into your car so that you can open the garage door by pressing one button in your car. So we have "must have," should have," and "would be nice to haveght see it acouple of times throughout the remainder of our courseand you might see it on your CAPM exam. But it's a very simple concept of managing tiered requirements. So let's take a look at what the tiered requirements are. Tiered requirements are where I have different levels of requirements. Sometimes they're conditional or situational requirements, or they'll be stated as "if then" requirements. So with tiered requirements, you might see those as having a top level of mandatory and a kind of second level that if we have time or money or a third level if we can get this, it's fine. So tiered requirements are just a way of stating that you have some different levels of requirements based on conditions that happen within the project. Now, some really common examples are here, and you probably have used these in your career. You have to have requirements where the deliverable must have a two-car garage. A should-have requirement is that the garage floor should be coated and sealed. Nice to have requirements would be that the garage door is the opener, for it can be keyed into your car so you can press one button in your car and the garage door opens. So we have "must have," "should have," and "would be nice to have." You absolutely have to do should have. You really should do it. But there may be a reason why it's not considered nice to have" or "kind of like optional," meaning that if we have the time or money, then that'd be great if we can make that work. Must-not-have requirements are a way of saying what is out of scope and that we will not be delivering it. So, for example, we will build the swimming pool, but we are not going to put water in the pool. Or you could say that the structure that you're building must have three bedrooms, but the master must not be on the second floor; it has to be on the first floor. So it's a way of excluding, or another way of saying what it must have by saying what it does not have. So those are some examples of some tiered requirements. Now you may see some project conditions, and I've already mentioned this. If there's enough time left, then yes, go ahead and do this. If there are sufficient funds, complete this deliverable, and sometimes you have a conditional. If we can't get the tile we want, we'll use carpet. So, based on the situation, we're already planning a response when, if, a requirement arises.

5. Observing the work

One way of collecting requirements is to observe the work. Seeing really is believing. So what this means is that you go out and you work with your stakeholders, and there are a couple of different ways you can observe the work. The first is just job shadowing, and this means that you are passively observing. You're not involved in the work, you're only observing what the stakeholder does. So this is really important, like with software development or if you're changing internal processes as part of your project, that you see how people do their work, which allows you to understand their work better. Passive observation. You only watch the work being performed, so you understand how your project will change the work. And this is part of the current state analysis. Now, active observation is where you get involved so that you can actually experience the work by participating hands-on. and this helps you really understand the work.

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