Project Management - Know Your Scope

Perhaps the most important thing to understand with any project that you are managing is exactly what your project is. This may seem obvious at first but if you stop to think about it you will probably be able to think of certain projects that were undertaken with no clear goal in mind, vague parameters, and no way to measure progress.

How can such projects happen? Simple, they are begun before the people involved have a clear understanding of what they are doing. Don’t let this happen to you. Generally, if you are put in charge of a project by higher management, then the goal will be quite specific. “Design a new phone,” “design a new tire tread,” or “create a marketing campaign for a new TV series” are all specific goals. If you have something like this, then a big part of your job has already been done.

It may be though that you are part of a larger research and development or marketing group with responsibility to simply “develop new technologies” or something equally vague and open ended. In such a situation, it is wise to work with your team to brainstorm ideas for different projects with more specific goals. Assuming that your goals are set, you still need to be concerned with parameters. Make sure that you understand your operating budget, deadline, how many people you can pick for the team and where they can come from, and things like what will your workspace be and how much time will be devoted to the project on a daily basis.

It is important to make sure that any guidelines like those above are clearly laid out. These provide direction for your project and keep you from making decisions that will run afoul of the boss. Again, if you are in an R&D style situation then you will have very broad guidelines and resources as well as the responsibility to make your own decisions about how best to apply them to your current project. Whatever the precise nature of your situation it is absolutely essential that you communicate the project parameters to your team so they understand the nature of their own boundaries.

And as your team will likely be broken down into smaller units to work on separate aspects of the project and each sub-team will have its own set of guidelines to govern their part of the project. To take the tire example from above, you will have a group researching different tread designs to determine which are most effective in different environments, a group looking into different kinds of rubber and their properties, and yet another into the best manufacturing processes, to say nothing of other aspects like the best way to mount and balance the given tire and eventually, you will need to set up a liaison with marketing once you have a product ready to go into production. Each of those groups will need resources like computers, workspace, testing facilities and most importantly, a way to communicate with each other.