What is the project scope? Influencing factors and how to determine them

Understanding and knowing how to clearly define project scope helps businesses effectively manage stakeholder expectations while ensuring that all project elements are aligned with goals, increase your chances of success. In the article below, let's learn about the project scope as well as influencing factors with 1C Vietnam.

1. What is the project scope?

Project scope is a detailed outline of all aspects of the project including goals, tasks, project implementation plan. By clarifying the project scope, the organization can ensure project objectives are achieved without delays or overwork as well as avoid confusion, conflict, and uncontrolled changes during the process. project implementation process.

Project scope defines goals, plans and implementation tasks

2. The importance of project scope (Project Scope)

Here are some important benefits of establishing project scope for any organization or business:

• Identify factors that stakeholders need to understand to avoid misdirected actions.
• Allows managers to understand detailed and specific project roadmaps to easily allocate budget and arrange work appropriately.
• Helps businesses prevent unexpected situations outside the established scope.
• Helps businesses focus all resources on a common goal, limiting wasting resources on things that do not bring many benefits.

Project scope plays an important role in helping businesses achieve their goals

3. Factors affecting project scope

Defining the project scope helps businesses have an overview of the steps and direction of the projects. To increase the likelihood of success, during the process of determining project scope, businesses need to pay attention to the following factors:

3.1. Time

To ensure effective use of the enterprise's budget and resources, project implementation time needs to be calculated in accordance with the scale of the project. Typically, the implementation time of a small project can be a few weeks while a large project can last up to several months or years.

Time is an important factor affecting project scope

3.2. Personnel

Accurately calculating the number and allocation of personnel for a project is very important to help businesses save time and budget. If calculated incorrectly, the project may be prolonged or not completed according to original requirements.

Reasonable human resource allocation helps businesses save time and costs

3.3. Budget

The project budget must meet feasibility requirements. In addition to project implementation costs, the budget also needs to include other expenses such as employee salaries, project bonuses,...

Within the scope of the project, the budget needs to be calculated carefully and reasonably

3.4. Project feasibility

Project feasibility is an important factor that businesses need to consider carefully before implementing. Feasibility assessment must be based on the market situation, financial capacity and professional knowledge level of employees in the enterprise.

Carefully consider the feasibility of the project before implementation

4. 5 steps to build project scope

After understanding what the project scope is, businesses can build the project scope based on the following 5 main steps:

4.1. Determine project needs

From the beginning, businesses need to determine the needs of the project. Only after having a complete and accurate answer about needs can businesses set specific goals. This step creates an overview of the tasks, how they will be performed to achieve the goals and meet the needs of the project.

Identifying project needs helps businesses better understand the tasks and how to implement them

4.2. Set goals

The next step is that businesses need to establish a system of small goals, then connect these goals together to achieve the final goal of the project. It is important that businesses need to answer the following questions:

• Can the goals be measured?
• Given the available resources, which goal can be most easily achieved? Which goal is not highly feasible?
• When faced with difficulties, which goal is still feasible? Which goals are difficult to achieve? How will difficulties in achieving goals affect the quality of the project?
• If there are problems, how will the budget be affected?
• Is the completion of the project's objectives guaranteed within the specified time period? How to meet the time factor effectively?

To determine the project scope, it is necessary to set specific goals

4.3. Describe the project scope

When establishing the project scope, businesses need to have clear knowledge of information related to the project, so they can describe their project in detail and accurately to customers and partners. In addition, businesses need to clearly understand the features and functions needed for the product or service.

You need to describe your project scope in detail to customers and partners

4.4. Develop possible risk scenarios

The actual implementation of the plan always has certain differences compared to the original plan. There may be obstacles and risks that prevent the business from reaching the expected goals. Therefore, building risk scenarios that may appear helps businesses respond promptly to bring the project back to its original trajectory and scope.

Some risks can be predicted such as environmental conditions, technology quality, human resources and budget generation,...

Predict risks that may be encountered during project implementation to find the best solutions

Above, 1C Vietnam shared what the project scope is, influencing factors and how to determine the project scope. Effective control of project scope has an important influence on project results. To build and deploy projects effectively, businesses can use support tools such as Digital Office software 1C:Document Management. With superior features to help manage, monitor, and strictly control project progress and scope to achieve optimal project efficiency. Contact 1C Vietnam today for software support and advice!