How To Deal With The 5 Common Challenges In Managing Project Scope
This will arm you with the skills and technique that you need to deal with one of the most challenging aspects of project management.
Scope management is challenging for any project manager. Being a junior project manager when you’re trying to find your way and work out what to do and add in some unruly stakeholders, it can be even more daunting.
There are numerous challenges associated with managing scope. Below are the most common obstacles that any PM will face.
The key skills to manage scope are:
Negotiation - your ability to bring everyone on the journey and get those unruly stakeholders to agree on what is in and out of scope. Your goal should be a win-win situation.
Conflict Management - it’s always challenging to have a conversation when people have differing views and disagreements. This skill will close the gap, come to an agreed outcome or compromise without damaging the relationship.
Running workshops and leading meetings - sometimes you need to get into the details and work through the misalignments and challenges. Being able to facilitate workshops and meetings with various stakeholders is important in getting the right outcome.
Conducting impact assessment and analysis - isn’t that what your team is for? Yes, they can do the work. But you will also need to be able to join the dots and be able to explain the implications of what they want.
Vague or Incomplete Requirements
The scope items are not clear and incomplete, or vague. This leads to project teams not having the full information and going down the wrong track. Outcomes and benefits are not being met, and having to pivot during delivery will impact timelines and budget.
Solution
Run scope and requirement workshops to identify scope items and their requirements. Having everyone together to work through the scope items will make sure that stakeholders are aligned and the project team get clarity on the requirements.
There will be a lot of information exchanged in conversations, meetings, workshops, and emails. Ensure the team reviews all relevant information and captures the scope and requirements. The document should be version-controlled and accessible for stakeholders to view.
Having regular playbacks and walkthroughs is helpful to help crystallise the scope for the stakeholders. And having these sessions during Discovery allows them to clarify, update and even change.
Having a visual of the scope can help clarify and provide alignment. I’m a fan of the user story map. This allows everyone to see the process and journey, and the requirements that fall under each step. A decision can be made on what goes in which release.
Having a backlog of scope items also allows stakeholders to validate and prioritise them. It’s quite powerful when used in conjunction with the user story map.
Scope Creep
One thing is certain: change. As the team progresses through the delivery cycle, new information will come to light. This new information will impact the delivery, and stakeholders will change their minds. This may impact timelines and budgets if the scope changes during the delivery cycle.
Solution
Put in place a change management process to capture any new and changed scope items. This ensures that any changes are captured, socialised among the stakeholders, it’s impact on the project timelines and budget is understood. Make sure that decisions are captured in the decision and change logs.
Having regular playback on the build would also provide stakeholders with visibility on progress and what is being delivered. This may open up opportunities for additional scope, but it also makes it easier to have conversations on scope as they can see the impact on delivery timelines and budgets and on additional benefits of the new scope items. It will allow easier conversation on whether the new scope item is required and to educate the stakeholders on the trade-off between scope, time and cost.
Gold Plating
This is when stakeholders start adding scope items on top of the minimum viable product to add more features and supposed value. These items usually fall into the ‘nice to have’ category. These features may or may not be used by the customer or user.
Solution
Ensure that there is agreement on what the minimum viable product is. Work with the business stakeholders to link benefits to the scope items to understand their value to them.
New items can be included in the backlog for future releases. This can be converted into user story maps, and features can be mapped to future releases.
Alignment between stakeholders
The last common challenge is when stakeholders do not agree on what the scope should be. This leads to conflicting directions and may cause rework, project overruns in budget and timelines.
Solution
Having alignment sessions with the various stakeholders. You may need more than one, and you’ll need to pull out all your skills in negotiation, mediation and conflict management to get a win-win situation.
Make sure you document the scope and get all stakeholders to sign off on it.
Review it regularly against what is being delivered and maintain transparency with all stakeholders.
A Challenging Problem
Scope management is challenging at the best of times. The common scenarios above will occur regardless of whether you’re a junior project manager or a seasoned professional.
Working on your communication skills and having a process in place to manage scope will mitigate a lot of the angst.
The more you practice these and use the solutions above the better you’ll be.
Practice
Pick one of the skills listed in the article above. Get a book, find a course or YouTube video on it. Learn it and practice it in your day-to-day work.
What did you find was easy about practising the skill? What did you find challenging? How will you overcome the challenges?
Let me know how it goes
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“The future belongs to those who learn more skills and combine them in creative ways.”
― Robert Greene, Mastery
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