Scope
Asking scope-defining questions
Make sure you understand the who, what, when, where, why, and how as it applies to the scope.
Stakeholders
- How did you arrive at the decision to ___?
- Did the request originate from the owner, customers, or other stakeholders?
- Who will approve the scope for the project?
Goals
- What is the reason for ___?
- What isn't working in the ___?
- What is the end goal of this project?
Deliverables
- What exactly needs to be updated?
- Does the ___ need a remodel?
Resources
- What materials, equipment, and people will be needed?
- Will we need to hire contractors?
- Will we need to attain permits?
Budget
- What is the budget for this project? Is it fixed or flexible?
Schedule
- How much time do we have to complete the project?
- When does the project need to be completed?
- Flexibility
- How much flexibility is there?
- What is the highest priority: hitting the deadline, sticking to the budget, or making sure the result meets all the quality targets?
Scope Creep
Scope creep is when a project's work starts to grow beyond what was originally agreed upon during the initiation phase.
Scope management best practices
- Define your project's requirements. Communicate with your stakeholders or customers to find out exactly what they want from the project and document those requirements during the initiation phase.
- Set a clear project schedule. Time and task management are essential for sticking to your project's scope. Your schedule should outline all of your project's requirements and the tasks that are necessary to achieve them.
- Determine what is out of scope. Make sure your stakeholders, customers, and project team understand when proposed changes are out of scope. Come to a clear agreement about the potential impacts to the project and document your agreement.
- Provide alternatives. Suggest alternative solutions to your customer or stakeholder. You can also help them consider how their proposed changes might create additional risks. Perform a cost-benefit analysis, if necessary.
- Set up a change control process. During the course of your project, some changes are inevitable. Determine the process for how each change will be defined, reviewed, and approved (or rejected) before you add it to your project plan. Make sure your project team is aware of this process.
- Learn how to say no. Sometimes you will have to say no to proposed changes. Saying no to a key stakeholder or customer can be uncomfortable, but it can be necessary to protect your project's scope and its overall quality. If you are asked to take on additional tasks, explain how they will interfere with the budget, timeline, and/or resources defined in your initial project requirements.
- Collect costs for out-of-scope work. If out-of-scope work is required, be sure to document all costs incurred. That includes costs for work indirectly impacted by the increased scope. Be sure to indicate what the charges are for.
The Tripple constraint Model
Ref.: thedigitalprojectmanager.com
The Iron Triangle
Success Criterias
Product quality To measure the success of a product, consider including these metrics on your checklist:
- Track if you implemented the product's priority requirements
- Track and assess the product's number of technical issues or defects
- Measure the percentage of features you delivered or released at the end of the project
What is important to the customers or stakeholders Strategic goals tie back to the business case and the reason you initiated the project in the first place. Often, you can measure the fulfillment of strategic goals via user or customer metrics. Metrics to consider include:
- Evaluating user engagement with the product
- Measuring stakeholder and customer satisfaction via surveys
- Tracking user adoption of the product by using sales data
Document, align, and communicate success
- Who ultimately says whether or not the project is successful?
- What criteria will be measured to determine success?
- What is the success of this project based on?
It is best practice to get the key stakeholders or the steering committee to review and approve your success criteria. This becomes a mutual agreement on how all parties define the success of the project.
Using OKRs to evaluate progress
Communicating and tracking OKRs
Conducting regular check-ins and actively tracking progress with your team can help ensure that objectives are being met.
- Share your OKRs with your team
- Assign owners. Assign an owner to every key result so that everybody knows who's responsible for what. This helps add clarity and increases accountability.
Measuring progress
One shortcut to determining the status of a project is to score or grade your OKRs.
Determine how you will score your OKRs. OKRs can be scored in different ways. You can score based on a percentage of the objective completed, the completion of certain milestones, or a scale of 1 to 10, for example. You can also use a "traffic light" scoring approach, where red means you didn't make any progress, yellow means you made some progress, and green means you completed your objective.
The simplest approach to scoring OKRs is the "yes/no" method, with "yes" meaning you achieved your objective and "no" meaning you didn't. Using this approach, a key result such as "Launch a new widget marketing campaign" might be graded a 1 or 0 depending on whether it was launched (1) or not (0).
A more advanced scoring approach is to grade your key results on a scale. With this method, if a key result was to "Launch six new features" and only three new features were launched, the OKR might be graded 0.5. Generally, if the KR helped you achieve the objective, your OKR should receive a higher score; if it didn't, your OKR should receive a lower score.
Google Scorecard Template
OKRs are usually graded on a scale of 0.0 to 1.0, with 1.0 meaning the objective was fully achieved. Each individual key result is graded and then the grades are averaged to determine the score for that OKR.
Set your scoring expectations. With Google's 0.0–1.0 scale, the expectation is to set ambitious OKRs and aim to achieve an average of at least 0.6 to 0.7 across all OKRs. For OKRs graded according to percentage achieved, the sweet spot is somewhere in the 60–70% range. Scoring lower may mean the team is not achieving what it could be. Scoring higher may mean the aspirational goals are not being set high enough.
Schedule checkpoints. It's important to regularly communicate the status of project OKRs with your team and senior managers. For example, it can be helpful to have monthly check-ins on the progress of OKRs to give both individuals and your team a sense of where they are. Typically, at the end of the quarter, you'll grade each of your OKRs to evaluate how well the team did to achieve its goals.
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