Chapter 5. Scope Management

Project Scope Management includes the processes required to ensure that the project includes all the work required, and only the work required, to complete the project successfully.

—PMBOK^® Guide

It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the ones most responsive to change.

—Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species

Next week there can’t be any crisis. My schedule is already full.

—Henry Kissinger

“Scope creep” has always been the bane of traditional project managers, as requirements continue to change in response to customer business needs, changes in the industry, changes in technology, and things that were learned during the development process. Scope planning, scope definition, scope verification, and scope control are all processes that are defined in the PMBOK^® Guide to prevent scope creep, and these areas earn great attention from project managers. Those who use agile methods believe these deserve great attention as well, but their philosophy on managing scope is completely different. Plan-driven approaches work hard to prevent changes in scope, whereas agile approaches expect and embrace scope change. The agile strategy is to fix resources and schedule, and then work to implement the highest value features as defined by the customer. Thus, the scope remains flexible. This is in contrast to a typical waterfall approach, as shown in Figure 5-1, where features (scope) are first defined in detail, driving the cost and schedule estimates. Agile has simply flipped the triangle.

Figure 5-1. Waterfall vs. Agile: The paradigm shift (original concept courtesy of the DSDM Consortium)