Tthere is a site I enjoy called weaselwords.com that encourages people to post BS words that are found in the corporate world. Consultants seem to take a large beating on the site for their abiltiy to charge huge sums of money for suggesting the same things everyone who works at the company has said needs done, but even they aren’t able to make happen. I’ll need to get a link put up for you
SCOPE is the start and end points of a project. Assume that you have a project working on a customer service issue like long call hold times. One possible reason for long hold times is that the telephone tech needs to look up something in the finance department database. Now this database is so messed up that we’re lucky to get anything out of it at all.
So the problem is: Should fixing the potential “root cause” of the problem (the finance database) be part of the changes to deal with the customer service issue above or not? That is SCOPE!
How far out of the direct problem area do we go to address the issue and problem identified? Cross functional issues are much more complex and complicated that those within a single business unit or group. At issue is how successful any project will be with a scope that’s simply to large.
To large a scope and the risk of doing the project increases due to the potential for change in corporate or management focus during the lengthy project effort. The best opportunity for success of any project is one that has a definite beginning and end scope. A clearly identifiable list of out of scope issues goes a long way in keeping a project on track, on time and on budget.