How to Scope a Project: A 5-Part Approach

 

Clarifying Scope is a Value-Driven Activity

You’re the one who bridges the gap between ideas and implementation, providing critical value. Without it, projects can drift, priorities can get muddled, and critical resources are often wasted on efforts that don’t provide any value for the organization.

But with a clear scope, you are setting the stage for collaboration, efficiency and ultimately delivering business value. Getting clear on scope doesn’t require pages and pages of requirements documentation.

In fact, the template we teach at Bridging the Gap has just five sections and can be typically written out in 2 to 3 pages, with the addition of a few visual models.

Not only am I going to review this business analyst template with you in these next few minutes, but I’m also going to show you how to use generative AI to create a working draft so that you can get something in front of your stakeholders and start asking questions sooner rather than later.

The Scope Statement Template

The other thing I wanted to tell you is you can download this specific template with the annotations that you’re going to see here, absolutely for free.

>>Click here to get your free copy of this template.

It’s going to be super useful when I show you how to use generative AI to generate your scope statement and save you hours of time right away.

1 – Project Scope: Project Overview

Let’s walk through what this document is and what this template is and what’s included and why. The first thing you want to have is a project overview. This is a short 2 to 3 sentence description of the project. Think of it like an elevator statement. If you were trying to describe the project really quickly, what would you say?

This is actually a bit long, but I’m going to read it through, so you get the sense of it.

We want to support the efficiency of our claim agents, and reduce the number of fallout calls by homeowners and contractors to check on the status of their claims and repairs. This project involves building a mobile application that will support all aspects of the onsite claims process, integrate with our customer service software, and provide online access to homeowners and contractors so they can view the status of all aspects of their claim and upload supporting documentation.

That’s a bit long. It gets a bit into the features, but it gives you an idea. You could shrink that down a little bit to make it more concise, but essentially it gives you this idea of the mobile app we’re building and why we’re building it.

2 – Project Scope: Expected Benefits or Business Objectives

The next section is the expected benefits. And here you want to have a list of between 2 and 5 inter-related business goals or objectives that are really the focus of the initiative. You want to make sure they work together and complement each other and help guide you towards an effective solution.

For example, on this project, the objectives could be

• Reduce the average time a claim agent spends preparing and submitting a claim from 8 hours to 6 hours or less.
• Reduce follow up calls to check on claim status by homeowners by 50%.
• Reduce follow up calls by contractors by 50%.
• Increase adoption of homeowner use of the online web application by 30%.

Now you’ll notice that these all have numbers, which means they’re quantifiable. Not all companies are set up to actually have current state metrics. You might not have great data on how many follow up calls you have by homeowners. If it’s important to have a measurable ROI and a measurable result like this from the project, the first thing you would need to do is implement those metrics.

If not, you could make your objectives more qualitative, which would be like reducing follow up calls to check on the claim status by enabling some functionality for the homeowners, or just reduce follow up calls to check on claim status. So you would have more of a qualitative goal than a specific measurement. But ideally, whenever we can, we want to have specific numbers.

3 – Project Scope: Capabilities / Solution Ideas

The next section is the capability. This is the capabilities of the solution to achieve the desired business objectives. I want to take a quick sidebar because for this whole template, you as the business analyst or even the project manager are not the one who gets to decide what goes in. You would be facilitating the process, facilitating the conversations, suggesting business objectives that could be met using AI even to give you ideas about business objectives.

But ultimately, it’s the business sponsor or the business stakeholders that are deciding what goes in that section and the same is true when you get to capabilities. You are going to meet with a team and collaborate with technology stakeholders and business stakeholders to come up with solution options that will meet those business objectives.

And those could include business processes and improvements, business functions, even whole departments, aspects of the software solution, technologies that need to be changed or replaced, system integrations, organizational units and even information assets.

Often we’re going to organize our capabilities in subgroups. In the template I’ve given you two subgroups to start from. And you could obviously copy and paste to add more if you need to.

Example Capabilities in a Scope Statement

Then here I’ve just added a few capabilities so you can see what kinds of capabilities we might add for this specific project.

• A claims agent can complete all aspects of preparing and submitting a claim, with some ideas of what those are.
• The customer can upload supporting documentation such as quotes and invoices to the claim.
• A contractor can upload supporting documentation.
• The ability for a customer or contractor to create and update their profile information and that that can be used across claims.

So that gives you a sense of scope that it’s not one claim, one customer, but customers and contractors have profiles so they might be able to see multiple claims or would be able to see multiple claims. All high level features of the system. And then here we have more of a business process part of the solution.

We’re going to review our current claim documentation requirements and business rules and explore opportunities to simplify. So that’s more of a business process requirement.

4 – Project Scope: Assumptions

The next section is assumptions. This is anything you believe to be true, but have not explicitly verified that.

You might assume that you can use your organization’s existing document management system to host the PDF, or that the mobile app will integrate with that and has a preexisting component of some sort to do that. You could have assumptions about any aspect of the project.

5 – Project Scope: Constraints

Similarly with constraints, constraints are what cannot be true. Like what are the constraints on the solution approach?

This can be the

• Budget,
• Timeline,
• Resources,
• Regulatory requirements,
• Existing systems,
• Platforms and functions….

Essentially, anything that that needs to be part of the solution.

Example Constraints on Project Scope

For example, on this project we might have constraints of what mobile devices where we’re servicing specifically for the claims agent because they might have a company supported phone. So we might constrain that the mobile app really is only going to be tested in that platform.

We might have a constraint on the budget, or the timeline has to be completed in three months using this number of team, or this number of resources or we might have a budget for contracting and consulting resources or for buying and licensing software.

Assumptions and constraints are really, really important to take into account.

5 – Bonus – Out of Scope Items

This is where you put anything that is not in scope. Because what happens is you’re going to talk about a lot of things when you’re talking about scope with stakeholders, and they’re going to remember the things that they said that they wanted to have in this document, even if they’re not listed.

And because this is a high-level document, you want to create a lot of clarity by listing specifically those things that were discussed and are not in scope. That way, you have that to refer back to later if you need to, when you’re managing expectations about budget and timeline.

How to Use Visual Models to Clarify Project Scope

Finally, I really recommend adding a couple of visual models.

One of my favorites to add to a scope statement is a system context diagram. It shows a central system and how it relates to other systems. Really useful for identifying system impacts that are easy to look over. Another great option is a high-level business process map.

>>Click here to read the full article about the System Context Diagrams

>>Click here to read the full article about Business Process Mapping 

Make sure to check those out if you want to add one of those to your scope statement.

How to Use GenerativeAI to Draft a Scope Statement

I promised to share how you can use generative AI tools to make the scope statement writing process even easier. In this case, I’m using ChatGPT. You can use any tool that’s provided by your company or your favorite generative AI tool.

Make sure you have permission to share any of the content you’re sharing from your employer or from the organization. That’s always extremely important. But what I’ve done here is I’ve uploaded the scope statement template. This is the same template we were just looking at.

>>Click here to get your free copy of this template.

I uploaded that as direction. Here is the prompt:

Using the template from this scope statement. Can you please create a draft scope statement for a project to incorporate sustainability guidelines into the procurement process and procurement system for a manufacturing company?

Really, the briefest of project overviews, you could take this a step further and write out your project overview. You’d probably get an even better result.

But what I got here was already pretty good. What you’ll see is they have the whole document information from the beginning; the project overview; some expected benefits you can consider; three different types of capabilities; sustainability guidelines; the system enhancements; training, and communication. You’ve got some assumptions and constraints to consider as well as even some out of scope items.

GenAI Gives You a Draft of a Scope Statement, But Stakeholder Engagement is Still Essential

Again you’re going to want to talk about this with stakeholders. Ask questions. Conduct a requirements review with stakeholders.

You’re going to want to review this yourself to make sure it reflects what you actually know. I have found that often if I want to answer a question or make a revision, I can give generative AI that information and ask them to update the document or update what they’ve provided. It gets even better results.

The other thing you can do, is provide AI with this prompt:

“Could you provide a list of questions I should be asking to gain more insight into the scope of this project?

And here we go – AI provides tons of questions. I might know the answer to one of these questions, and so I could feed back that answer and have it update the scope statement. I might want to ask the answer in the same thing. I could see that answer, and once I get it and have the scope statement updated for me, and then eventually I’m going to be ready to confirm it, validate it, call it done, and move on to the next stage of the process.

Download the Scope Statement Template

I hope you are inspired to focus on clarifying scope, and adding more value as a business analyst.

Again, if you want a copy of that template, you can click here to get your free scope template.

Looking for More?

Scope is step 3 in the business analysis process – watch this video to understand the end-to-end role a business analyst fills on a new project or initiative.