Sprint resource capacity planning sheet
February 28, 2023
A well-defined and researched digital scoping program offers the highest possibility that all of your scheduled timelines, business objectives, and budgets are met during a series of development projects.
Digital strategy experts offer development project digital scoping by approaching your program from an all-inclusive perspective. They also help you invest your budget wisely on accurate technical projects over a reasonable time period.
In addition, they actively develop digital solutions to meet your business needs and exceed business challenges. By developing a detailed digital scoping program early in the project life cycle, we can provide you with these programs with the most valuable resource: Time.
Time for ideas to mature, building concepts, execution, testing, and knowledge transfer. Using a proven approach for the scoping of your development projects, you can easily predict potential roadblocks and dependencies to streamline the process and eradicate unnecessary costs and time-consuming conversations.
Project scope is generally a way to define the work you are ready and agree to deliver. It also describes the limitations and constraints of the project. It is important to define the scope of a project to determine how long it will take to complete?
Estimating what will go into the project (money & time) will help inform all the stakeholders involved in the project to make better decisions.
The process involved the clients and the project team (and the entire organization). It is also essential to remember that there is a boss above the project organizers who want to be updated about all the team’s resources for accomplishing the task.
Once you identify the essential resources, the importance of digital scoping becomes clear due to the prioritization of features. Sometimes, features get cut to save costs because even a low-value feature sometimes uses significant resources.
In addition, during the building process, stakeholders always introduce a new feature. So, it is essential to address the feature priority to determine when and what new feature needs to build.
Depending on the complexity and breadth of a project, various types of scopes can be considered, such as:
It defines the key functionalities that your service or product should deliver. In the functional digital scoping, you can include or exclude the functionality blocks depending on your project.
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It specifies the digital scoping around data archiving, data immigration, and data set-up, particularly for technology projects.
It defines the key technologies that will be required in the processing of your project or delivery of your products or services. For example, you can include hardware, apps, and tools in the technical scope
It explains which roles in your organization or company are in-scope for a particular project. For example, you need only marketing managers or all marketing employees.
All the duties are assigned to the relevant person for executing the project task. For instance, data immigration would be in the project team’s scope, whereas data cleaning would not be in the responsibilities scope.
It defines the geographical areas included in your project or if your project covers a large territorial area such as several cities or countries.
When you scope digital projects, you need to consider:
The earlier communication with the project sponsor or client should be about the project’s goals. In this phase of goals discussion, the most important questions are those that start with “why” compared to those that deal with “how.”
It is because of a simple reason that every team member should participate in the decision-making to achieve the project goals.
If some tasks do not support the project goals, then either these tasks should move to a different scope (different project), or the goals need to be reconsidered.
Once the goals of a project are recognized, it is time to discuss with the involved parties their restrictions and limitations. The common limitations often include:
The most important point, the stakeholder’s review process, is often overlooked. Project managers think that the review process is completed when the clients approve the work most of the time.
But it is necessary to approve by the CEO of the clients because sometimes they review the works later and ask for changes. So, if you do not discuss that process earlier, you will face a series of problems later.
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It is important to define the information architecture for clearly defining the project scope. So, it does not matter if your project is large or small; make sure to define information architecture (IA) as it affects the project scope by determining:
It is the most important factor for determining the digital scope, irrespective of what process you are using. By dividing or decomposing a larger project into smaller components, estimating the potential time to complete the project is easy.
In addition, it also helps in determining the risks associated with the project. Small components that individually take a short time than the overall unit time are “feature sets.”
All feature sets and components should be discussed and estimated as discrete items. In addition, they should be essential and easy to understand by all clients and stakeholders. Thus, breaking a larger project into smaller components can make it very clear that it helps determine the project’s goals.
It is always essential to identify the risks associated with the project, and it depends on the potential outcomes that can occur after the execution of the project. Also, consider what will happen if the project fails and if the project goes above the desired budget?
These are essential questions that you need to consider, and the decomposition of a project into smaller components also helps in this regard.
Thus, it allows the estimated potential risk associated with individual components of a project. Various methodologies and strategies are used to estimate and communicate the risk associated with the project.
Still, the most simple and easy way is to assign low, medium, and high ratings to each feature set and component. Thus, you can categorize the risk according to their severity.
The scope statement defines the tasks that need to be done and the parameters related to that task. It also defines what is in and what is out of the project. So, the scope statement of a project defines:
The scope statement is usually available within the work statement but can also be present independently to give a detailed explanation for an estimate. These statements provide information about specific variables and define the individual components within the work statement.
Project scope statements are important because they define the importance of project scope. It also helps to understand how much you will pay for the work.
It is common for clients and stakeholders to want to know what tasks they are paying for and the outcome. Most of the projects have limitations.
So, stakeholders or clients want to know the limitations and boundaries of the project, the involved participants, the followed process, and how the work breakdown structure (WBS) will convert into the actual delivered work or the deliverables.
Furthermore, if the stakeholder or client is paying you more, you will include more within the project digital scoping, and they are paying less, you will add less within the project scope.
You can design these statements in various ways, and they are the essential responsibility of producers of digital project managers. A sound digital scope statement will save your bacon when the designed things go off the rails.
The most common types of project scope statements are:
The other names that people use for project scope statements are present within the work statement. These names are a little different, but whether they are 3 or 300 pages, all these documents with different names generally fulfill the same purpose. They define the project parameters. The most common names are:
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There are also numerous legal documents that you need to complete before, after, or during the landing of your statement of work. They are related documents that are essential and not equivalent to project scope statements.
It is the contract that both parties must sign before starting any work.
It is a long legal document that your account person provide to you. It is one of the essential documents that describe the ToR (Terms of relationships) and set up all your future meetings and engagements. Therefore, you need to have this document before the statement of work comes.
It is also an essential legal document that most digital project managers often sign when negotiating with professional contractors, services, or freelancers.
The main purpose of signing this legal document is to ensure that the designated task does not offer full-time employment for tax purposes. So, the legal document can save you when they fail to deliver the work on time or make mistakes.
It is also a legal document that describes your domain services, hosting, and commitments between the client and your company for maintenance support. If a client demands the output before time, you can show SLA and define legal boundaries between you and your client.
The legal documents and the scope statements matter a lot because they can make or break your job, a lawsuit, or your relationship with a client. So, a statement of scope matters a lot because if it is half-assessed, it can ruin your success chances even before the start of the project.
It includes the things required in a project and defines the grey matter. The items and assumptions that are not part of the scope can be ruled out through the scope statement.
So, the scope of statements defines the ins and outs of a project, and if you do not know them, you will deal with scope creep and brewing up tension.
As we have discussed the importance of the scope statement, let’s dive into the five essential things that you can do for perfect digital scoping of your project and save your bacon.
One of the high-level scope statements describes all the whys related to the project, such as what is the project? Why are you going to accomplish this project, and what will be the possible outcome of the project? The reasons for conducting a project differ from business to business.
For instance, if we consider the example of banking and insurance, many projects come out for external reasons. And when it comes to industry, many projects come ours for internal reasons. So, it is essential to define the reasons and goals of your project before starting the execution.
One of the high-level scope statements describes all the whys related to the project, such as what is the project? Why The other best thing that you can do to save your bacon is to streamline the approval process from the client.
It is really frustrating when you fail to get timely feedback for deliverables from your clients or all the involved stakeholders. So, here you can set the expectations in the scope of work to avoid surprises in the review process.
The most important thing while defining the scope of your project is that if your project is mature, it is easy to plan and estimate the workload and main activities. In addition, it is also easy to consider the availability of major resources required for the project.
So, for a better digital scoping of your project, you need to set the timeline’s milestones as the project progresses. So, if you have a reasonable deadline, you can either allocate a reasonable budget for your project or reduce the project’s overall scope. Thus, make sure to reduce grey areas and ambiguity as much as possible.
You need to make sure who the project’s clients and stakeholders are? Make sure to consider all and define their responsibilities. In addition, maintain a targeted communication plan for the entire duration of the project.
It is also necessary because most projects fail due to the lack of interaction and communication between various stakeholders.
So, make sure to consider all sponsors, executive managers, project teams, departments, end-users, clients, and external organizations.
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Project digital scoping is an essential part of the project planning stage that involves identifying and documenting a list of specific goals, tasks, deliverables, deadlines, and costs. During the whole project, the documentation of digital scoping helps the team and managers to remain focused and complete their tasks.
A scoping statement or document is a general agreement between the client/stakeholders and the project team that covers the project’s constraints and objectives. The basic purpose of creating the scoping statements is to manage the expectations of the clients or stakeholders.
The five steps of defining scope are:
• Define the goals
• Define possible obstacles
• Identify essential resources
• Provide a landmark schedule
• List the clients or stakeholders
Every project contains three common dimensions: time, budget, and scope. These three common dimensions are available in various project management training and books. In addition, these three dimensions are used to determine the success of a project.
It is very easy to develop a project scope statement by following these 8 key steps.
• Determine why the project was started
• Define the key goals and objectives of the project
• Outline the statement of work for the project
• Find major deliverables
• Select key landmarks or milestones
• Identify major obstacles
• Identify what’s in and what’s out
• Obtain sign-off
Most projects have five common phases: initiation/beginning, definition and preparation, execution, application, control, and close. Each phase contains explicit tasks that help reach the project’s goals and objectives.
