5 Ideas to Mitigate the Scope Changes in Your Project - Part 1 of 2

In this podcast, Ricardo talks about how can we minimize scope changes in a project. He explains that we need to have a connection between the functional scope, client-oriented, and the technical scope, that is team-oriented. And that we also should make a plan as detailed as possible. Next week, listen to the continuation of this podcast, where Ricardo will suggest three other control measures: the formalization, the phasing of the project and the rolling wave planning.

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Episode transcript

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Hello everybody welcome in the five minutes PM podcast today, I like to discuss with you, how do we minimize the scope changes in the pros that environment. This is really, really a nightmare in the project. Manager's life it's show heart. The challenge is so big that we are always facing the customer, the client, or the supplier, trying to change the scope and why this happened. I'd like to address two topics. First have them.

Usually we do a very poor Scope planning. We do have a very generic Scope in our project, and this allows people to have different understanding of what we really want with the Project. And second one time counts against us. If you are planning for a project that will be executed and delivered in the Next week, this is one scenario. But if we are planning a project to be delivered in for five, six, 10 years from now, it's a completely different scenario because time brings change.

So this is a natural process. So we have this two challenges. Usually we do a weak, very weak, Oh, planning and Sachen. The time does not count in favor of us. It's always, always something that creates trouble and creates Scope change. Let me just give you a brief example. Let's suppose that you need to do a currency conversion from U S dollars to eeros and you're project will be delivered next week.

It's quite easy and the float will be quite small from the crew in straight. But imagine that this project will take 10 years, he to be very hard for any of us to predict how will be the relationship between we in the U S dollar in the era of 10 years from now, but most of our big, big and major projects, they need to handle with that. So how we can minimize. So I create the five measures and the actions that you can put in place to do that.

The first one is to understand the link between functional technical And activities. Scope so the functional requirements of the functional scope, it's pretty much related to the desires of your customer, of your client. So it's client oriented. So let's suppose that I have a car and I want a now to mathic your car and go as a client.

What I want, I want to see how I can change fast, the gear of my car. So this is related where we put the gear, how it works better, but in the back technical site, I need to decide exactly how many rotations the engine needs to take to change the Gere automatically. So this is a tactic. Can we call Scope? So the customer wants to have a black paint in his wall, but you need to decide, will this paint be a patch high and Z, which kind of tools do I need to paint?

Which kind of resources? So this is much more related to the scope of the activities in to the technical requirements. So I went to have that have a database does or does the client site that could be accessed anywhere, but in the technical sides, all the database we'll be an X, Y, or Z. And we'll do, we host that in this provider and this one, a country. So look the difference. So if we do not know the LINC, most of the time, we will have a misconnection in, on what the client wants in what we are providing.

And this will create Scope Changes remember not always, your customer knows exactly what should be done. So we need to make this link. If we do this perfectly, Dan will be more successful. The second one, how is work hard on planning in detail? We usually Hey to plan and the tail. What do we always like to do is to create something based can quick and quick. And sometimes we miss the point.

So if you were preparing the scope statement, you must do this before you create the WBS chart, you need to be careful to take care of the details. The failure we will come from the detail's that you missed and not from the mainstream. It's really, really important. One, understand that. So if you work hard planning under the table, if you spent more time for short, you save 10 times that time that you spend during the execution, because you'll have all the gaps, fill it before the problems raise it.

So this is the second one work hard. And Next week. I want to share with you the audit three of them, but I like just to share with you, they are based concepts right now, the turd one is related to become more formal and do agreements before the work, the fourth one it's create or a split the projects in two phases. And this will open the space to the last one is working. We're rolling wave planning because as far as the project goes, as easy as it for someone else to do Scope Changes, but this we'll be discussing in our second.

Podcast have this theory that will be delivered next week. I hope you enjoy it and see your next week with another five minutes BM Podcast.

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