1. You are managing a project with a duration of 24 months and a budget of $12 million dollars. Assume that you are running two months behind schedule, but you have enough money to complete it. Should you crash or fast track your schedule? Explain your reasoning.

2. When would scope creep or gold plating be acceptable for a project?

MBA 6941, Managing Project Teams 1

Course Learning Outcomes for Unit III

Upon completion of this unit, students should be able to:

8. Assess strategies to manage organizational change.
8.1 Explain how the triple constraints play an integral role in managing a successful project.
8.2 Explain the relationship between the scope statement and the WBS and why they are

fundamental to project success.
8.3 Identify the critical path of a project and why it is important to an effective schedule

management.

Reading Assignment

Chapter 8: Scope

Chapter 13: Time

Unit Lesson

Project Scope Management

Project scope management includes the processes concerned with all of the work required to successfully
deliver a project to the stakeholders’ expectations, manage changes, minimize surprises, and gain
acceptance of the product in order to complete the project. During scope management, the project manager
should always be in control of the scope and must make sure of the following:

 each requirement is documented with the acceptance criteria defined;

 all the work is being completed;

 define and control what is and is not in the project;

 guard against additional scope not covered under the
project charter;

 prevent extra work or “gold plating,” which increases risk
and uncertainties and introduces problems into the project;

 proactively identify and influence the factors that cause
changes; and

 capture, evaluate, and manage the scope changes in a
controlled, structured, and procedural manner (Perrin,
2013).

Key Terms in Project Scope Management:

 Triple constraints: A project’s scope is one the triple
constraints, so managing the scope of the project is one of
the key ways in which project management performance
can be measured. Since scope is usually owned by the
project sponsor or the customer but managed by the project
manager, project scope management is especially challenging (Perrin, 2013).

 Scope creep: Scope creeps are unapproved and undocumented changes, and they occur when
changes to the scope are not detected early enough or managed. All these minor changes slowly add
up and may have drastic impact on budget, schedule, and quality (Perrin, 2013).

Causes of scope creep can include the following:

UNIT III STUDY GUIDE

Project Performance and
Team

Graphical representation of triple
constraints (Mapto, 2007)

MBA 6941, Managing Project Teams 2

UNIT x STUDY GUIDE

Title

 Unexpected scope-related issues: These issues can change project requirements or increase the
project’s complexity.

 Placating stakeholders: This involves giving in to stakeholders’ additional requests without following
the proper approval process, which can lead to cost and time overruns.

 Perfectionism: Team members often try to improve the product without proper approval, which can
also lead to cost and time overruns.

 Misunderstanding about the project scope: Ambiguous and unclear scope can cause the project team
to misunderstand requirements about the project, causing scope creep (Turner, 2014).

Project vs. product scope: Project scope management deals with managing both the product scope as well as
the project scope. Product scope describes the features, functions, and physical characteristics that
characterize a product, service, or result. It may also include subsidiary components. Completion is measured
against the product requirements to determine successful fulfilment. While project scope describes work
needed to deliver a product, service, or result with the specified features and functions, completion of project
scope is measured against the project plan, project scope statement, and work breakdown structure (WBS)
(Perrin, 2013).

Project Scope Management Processes

The project scope management process helps the project management team determine how the project
scope will be defined, how the work breakdown structure (WBS) will be created, how the scope will be
validated by the customers and stakeholders at the end of the project and at the end of each project phase,
and how the scope will be managed and controlled throughout the project. The project team must have a
clear understanding of the project, the business and need for the project, the requirements of the project, and
the stakeholder expectations for the project.

The project scope management plan is a planning process, and the first thing you want to do is to plan how to
define, validate, and control your project scope and come up with the scope and requirement management
plan. You then ask your team members to work closely with the customers and other stakeholders to collect
requirements from them. The team members will be working on a requirement document to document the
quantifiable needs and expectations of the customers and stakeholders. Next, the team must be working on a
scope statement document to develop a comprehensive and detailed description of the project and product
and identify all the work that needs to be done to complete project requirement. Now that the team has a clear
understanding about the project deliverables, as a project manager you need to decompose these
deliverables and project work into smaller, more manageable components so that you can easily assign
resources and come up with a detailed WBS. Developing the scope management plan, requirements
management plan, requirement document, scope statement documents, and WBS are all done during a
planning process group meeting (Turner, 2014).

PMI identifies six key processes that are associated with the scope management areas. Since scope is one of
the triple constraints, an understanding of these procedures is vital to project success:

Process Process

Group

Detail Key Outputs

1. Plan Scope
Management

Planning This is the process of
creating a scope
management plan that
explains how project scope
will be defined, validated,
and controlled in the project.

Scope
Management
Plan
Requirement
Management
Plan

2. Collect
Requirements

Planning This is the process of
collecting and documenting
measurable needs and
expectations of the project
stakeholders.

Requirement
documentation
Requirement
Traceability
Matrices

MBA 6941, Managing Project Teams 3

UNIT x STUDY GUIDE
Title

3. Define Scope Planning This is the process of
developing a detailed and
comprehensive description
of the project/product.

Project Scope
Statement

4. Create WBS Planning This is the process of
breaking down
(decomposing) project
deliverables, and works into
tasks, activities, work
packages (Smaller
components)

Scope Baseline

5. Validate
Scope

Monitoring
and
Controlling

This is the process of
obtaining stakeholder’s
formal acceptance of the
completed project scope and
corresponding deliverables.

Accepted
Deliverables
Change
Requests

Control Scope Monitoring
and
Controlling

This is the process of
monitoring the project and
product status, maintaining
control over the project
through the management of
scope change requests, and
managing charges to the
scope baseline.

Work
Performance
Information
Change
Requests.

(Perrin, 2013)

Now that you know the scope of your project, the next step is to determine how long it would take to
complete. This process is known as the project time management processes.

Project time management is focused on planning, developing, managing, executing, and controlling a project
schedule. It is important to note that before you start work on the schedule, you should have completed
working on the business case, feasibility study, project charter, developed a scope management plan, a
requirement management plan, scope statement, and the work breakdown structure (WBS) in a planning
process group meeting. When a project manager starts working on the project schedule, he/she—along with
the project team—will consider all of the activities that will need to be completed based on the project’s WBS.
Once all the project work has been identified and the activity list has been generated, it is time to put the
activities into the order necessary to reach the project completion. Once the work has been organized and
visualized, it is time to staff it. Project resource estimating considers people that your project will need as well
as the materials and equipment. Of course, management and the project stakeholders will want to know how
long the project work will take to complete. A project manager must control the project schedule by applying
the method of schedule compression and fast tracking (Turner, 2014).

PMI identifies seven key processes that are associated with time management knowledge area. Since time is
one of the triple constraints, an understanding of these processes is vital to project success.

MBA 6941, Managing Project Teams 4

UNIT x STUDY GUIDE
Title

Processes Process
Groups

Detail Key Outputs

1. Plan Schedule
Management

Planning The process of defining
how the project schedule
will be planned, developed,
managed, executed, and
controlled

Schedule
Management plan

2. Define
Activities

Planning The process of
decomposing the WBS
work packages into
schedule activities that are
at a level small enough for
estimating, scheduling,
monitoring, and changing.

Activity List
Activity Attributes
Milestone List

3. Sequence
Activities

Planning The process of identifying
and documenting
relationships among
defined activities and
arranging them in the order
they must be performed.

Project Schedule
Network

4. Estimate
Activity
Resources

Planning The process of estimating
the resources such as
material, equipment,
manpower, and supplies
required to perform
activities in the project.

Activity Resource
Requirements
Resource
Breakdown
Structure

5. Estimate
Activity
Durations

Planning The process of estimating
durations for the activities of
the project by utilizing
scope and resource
information, such as in who
will be doing the work,
resource availability, and
number of resource
assigned.

Activity Duration
Estimates

6. Develop a
Schedule

Planning The iterative process of
analyzing activity sequence,
dependency, logical
relationships, durations,
resources (such as
materials, manpower,
equipment, supplies),
constraints, and
assumptions to develop the
project schedule with
planned dates for project
activities completion.

Schedule Baseline
Project Schedule

7. Control
Schedule

Monitoring &
Controlling

The process of monitoring
the status of the project by
comparing the result to the
plan, updating project
progress, and managing
changes to the project
schedule baseline.

Work Performance
Information
Change Request
Schedule
Forecasts

(Perrin, 2013)

MBA 6941, Managing Project Teams 5

UNIT x STUDY GUIDE
Title

Leads and Lags

 Lead: A lead is an acceleration of the successor activity, or in other words, a successor activity
getting a jump start. A lead may be added to start an activity before the predecessor activity is
completed. For example, there may be a finish-to-start relationship between design and coding in a
software development project, but coding may start five days before design is completed. This is an
example of a finish–to–start with five days lead.

 Lag: A lag is an inserted waiting time between activities. For example, you must wait three days after
pouring concrete before you can construct the frame for the house. This can be shown as a finish-to-
start with three day’s lag (Turner, 2014).

Critical Path Method (CPM)

The critical path is the longest path through a network diagram and determines the shortest time to complete
the project as well as any scheduling flexibility (Perrin, 2013). It is not the project schedule, but it indicates the
time period within which an activity could be scheduled considering activity duration, logical relationships,
dependencies, leads, lags, assumptions and constraints. Below are a few important points about the critical
path:

 It identifies how much individual activities can be delayed without delaying the project.

 It is the path with zero float. None of the activities in the critical path can slip (Perrin, 2013).

References

Mapto. (2007, September 6). Project-triangle-en.svg [Image file]. Retrieved from
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Project-triangle-en.svg

Perrin, R. (2013). PMP exam prep boot camp. Retrieved from

http://edwel.com/materials/PMP%20Exam%20Prep%20Manual%20Online%20Free%205_0_1

Suggested Reading

In order to access the resource below, you must first log into the myCSU Student Portal and access the
Business Source Complete database within the CSU Online Library.

This article gives you an insight on how to manage the project triple constraints and its implication to project
success:

Managing the triple constraints. (2010). PM Network, 24(8), 54.