"Freeze the base" - Importance of a Scope Baseline Plan

In most projects, one thing that generally hits the project managers hard is to define what is in scope and what’s not. This is by far one of the most important sub-project plan since it determines the work involved, the resources required, budget required, the final project deliverable and sign-offs required to close the project. Given all these you need to make sure all the elements that make up a scope baseline are addressed at the earliest and communicated to the stakeholders of the project.

Drawing up a Scope Baseline.

The 3 most important documents that should be part of a Scope baseline are:

1. Work Breakdown Structure - The WBS defines each deliverable and further decomposes in deliverable into smaller work packages.
2. WBS Dictionary - The WBS Dictionary contains the actual detailed description of the work required, and is often a very detailed and technical description of each work package.
3. Scope Statement -The Project Scope Statement includes the product scope description and the project deliverable, and it also defines the product user acceptance criteria.

Once the deliverables are confirmed in the scope statement, they need to be developed into a work breakdown structure (WBS) of all the deliverables in the project. The scope baseline includes all the deliverables produced on the project, and therefore identifies all the work to be done. The following should form part of the scope baseline plan:

• All the activities and individual tasks that need to be done to achieve the deliverable identified.
• The resource required for each of the tasks identified. Likely resource constraints, their involvement and ability to execute each task in the available time frame.
• Part of the time management plan e.g. time required for the tasks identified.
• Estimated cost of resources for each tasks based on some notional unit of calculation.
• A complete schedule linking all tasks, resources and time estimates. With start and end dates clearly laid out.
• Identified dependant tasks and their involvement in the critical path.
• Setup a cost baseline which should include a time based budget as well, i.e. a milestone based budget gateway taking into account the cost of resources and cost of time taken to complete the tasks in the WBS dictionary.

With all the above in a scope baseline plan it’s easier to control the momentum of the projects progress.  However, there is always a likelihood that Scope changes are required as the project goes forward, that’s because not everything can be determined upfront, so educate your project sponsors of the likely area a scope creep could occur and always plan to keep some project budget available for these scope additions, after all, these could end up being project deliverables that are an absolute must to achieve the company’s objectives.

I’ll like to think that every Project is like a "Skier" sliding down a “snow slope“which can be thought of as the Scope, if you have a locked in scope that would equate to a good body of snow with the right density, then you will most likely cruise through the project deliverable s and close the project successfully, but if not, then get ready for a wobbly ride ahead !!

Hope this helps. Drop me your queries & comments on ssurenlk@msn.com.

9 - Analyzing too much for the sake of it (Just saying...)

When made responsible to analyses a process and come up with solution, keep in mind the final key deliverable of what needs to be done to make the solution work. Don’t get too bogged down on the intrinsic details of the connecting systems that do not have any direct impact on the final outcome. There are too many consultants out there who like to analyze for the sake of it and don’t deliver the final outcome, with all the connecting systems these days it’s not “attention to detail” that matters but it’s more about “attention to the details that matter”.  Don’t become subject to “paralysis by analysis”!!