Wednesday 23 October 2013

Control Scope Process

The Control Scope Process is concerned with ensuring that the scope baseline is pristine and is not breached unless a proper change control process is followed. The baselines are usually maintained in the project management plan and the PM plan also being the master plan can also be useful in analyzing the impacts when one of the baseline changes. So, that way, the PM plan is a common input for all the monitoring and controlling processes. Note that the scope baseline includes the scope statement so, that also gets included when PM Plan is the input.
Apart from this, the requirements documentation is also useful in this process. The requirement documentation is an exhaustive document to be considered for the control scope process since the scope statement has the boundaries but, the requirement document probably provides better details about the context when requirements were collected.
The requirement traceability matrix provides a quicker lookup in terms of finding what all requirements have been covered across the project phases and ensuring that all requirements have been covered and only the requirements relevant to the project context are covered. Also, in order to be sure that the baselines are under control , metrics are  an important factor. This is where the work performance data is useful.
Work Performance data is an output from the executing process provided by the project team. This has details about what requirements have been covered and what percentage has been covered. Apart from these, how scope control has been handled so far in other similar projects? What issues have been faced and how they were handled so far is picked from organizational process assets.
So, these are the inputs for this process:
1. Project Management Plan: What are the baselines and the concerned impacts in case of a change.
2. Requirement Documentation: List of requirements provided by different stakeholders providing the need to control scope.
3. Requirement Traceability Matrix: What requirements have been handled and what are not or is there any scope creep? Control Scope is needed then.
4. Work Performance Data: Is project health good? Is something wrong because of a scope creep introduced recently by the project team?
5. organizational Process Assets: How scope creep has been handled before?

Once the inputs are available, the most important technique employed is variance analysis. Is there a variance from the baseline? What amount of variance from the baseline and what are the possible solutions without impacting the other factors or, what other factors get impacted.
So, here is the most important technique utilized in this process:
1. Variance Analysis

Once variance analysis is done, there might be a need to present the information to the change control board, in case there is a variance or deviation from the planned scope. So, presentation of the data is important. Impacts to different project constraints like cost, time, risks are documented to be presented as work performance information. While Work Performance information has details about project health, the change request is used to present the information in a format desired by the change control board so that the board can make the necessary decision and sign off the request. In the whole process of collating the work performance information and documenting the change request, the project documents and project management plan might be updated. Since the control scope process is also concerned with including approved changes in the scope baseline, the approved changes can in turn impact the project management plan milestones or the risk register. So, these take the form of project management plan updates and project document updates respectively. Organizational Process Assets get more documents in the form of approved or rejected change requests or any lessons learnt as part of this process. So, these are the outputs of this process:
1. Work Performance Information: Collating the information in a presentable format to analyse project impacts and solutions.
2. Change Requests: Present the information in a format needed by the Change Control Board (CCB).
3. Project Management Plan Updates: Milestones updates as a result of change in baseline.
4. Project Document Updates: Changes to other documents like risk register, change register.
5. Organizational Process Asset Updates: Lessons Learnt, more documentation updates.

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