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The purpose of the project scope is to define the boundaries
of the project. A lot projects are not successful because
there is no clear scope. There fore, the team ends up focusing
in the less important areas of the project. Remember, the
project results are measure by the customer. Therefore, the
scope of the project must include what the customer wants.
The scope of the project should be as specific as possible.
Bellow are some characteristics of a good project scope:
- It defines who is the customer
- It outlines the final deliverable to be produced
- It defines the criterias that the customer will use to
measure their satisfaction
Start defining your scope by giving your project a name.
Project Name: The project
name should reflect the purpose of the project. Use action
verbs and objectives in the project name
For example, the project name for our case study is "Increase
Production". As you can see the project name gives
away the purpose of the project. The major deliverable of
this project is to increase bicycle production to meet market
demands.
Make Sure That Your Scope Is Not Too Big
There are a lot of teams that work under huge scopes. Their
projects take years to complete. Must of the time these projects
are never completed or deliver a final product. The scope
must be obtainable within a reasonable time frame (3 months).
If the scope is bigger than that then you need to break the
project into phases to be able to deliver a final product.
Another risk that projects with big scopes inquire is that
if they are able to deliver a final product. The final product
is not what the customer wants at the time of the delivery.
For example, The customer wants a new PC with 200MHZ in 1998.
If it took you as a supplier two years to deliver what the
customer wants. In 2000 the customer does not want a 200 MHz
PC, they want a 1GZ PC. Therefore, you are not meeting the
customer current necessities.
How do we narrow the scope of the project?
There are a lot of tools that can help you narrow the scope.
One of the most effective ones is call a QFD.
(Click here to Learn how to
create a QFD). For most projects you can start narrowing
the scope by segmenting the different processes or functionality
of the product you are trying to build.
For the purpose of our case study we know we need to increase
production to meet market demand, but our company currently
sales 5 different brands of bicycles. So, which bicycle production
should we increase. Let's look at the sales and inventory
numbers for our company.
| Product Name |
Sales (%) |
Sales (Units) |
Current Inventory |
| X-Mountain |
47% |
700,000 |
25,000 |
| BYU |
7% |
100,000 |
450000 |
| X25-Mountain |
33% |
500,000 |
50,000 |
| LOPEX |
10% |
150,000 |
130,000 |
| J400-SPORT |
3% |
50,000 |
310,000 |
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TOTALS
|
|
1,500,000 |
965,000 |
Based on this data you can notice that there is a high demand
for the X-Mountain and the X25-Mountain bikes. Also, that
the BYU, LOPEX, and J400 SPORT are not selling as fast. Therefore,
increasing sales to these three last products will not increase
sales. Based on these numbers we learn that our total production
is (Total Sales + Total Inventory) 2,465,000. The gab we are
trying to fill is 735,000 bikes (if we completely sell our
inventory).
From this data we conclude our project scope:
To increase production of X-Mountain and X25-Mountain
bikes by x percent and to analyze why BYU, LOPEX, and J400
SPORT bikes are not selling as munch.
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