Managing project scope well is vital to the success of all projects. Visual communications is an essential but often missing tool in the project manager’s tool box. Before discussing how visual communications can help, let’s quickly review project scope management’s purpose and phases.

Project Scope Management

Managing project scope is all about creating a shared understanding of project delivery: what it IS going to deliver and what it is NOT going to deliver. This vital activity occurs throughout the entire project management life cycle.

Project scope management generally consists of five major activities listed and summarized below:

• Planning – These planning activities result in the creation of the project scope management plan. The plan specifies how the project scope will be defined, verified, controlled, and how the work breakdown structure (WBS) will be created and defined.
• Definition – The definition effort results in a detailed project scope statement. The statement is used as the basis for all future project decisions.
• WBS Creation – The Work Breakdown Structure effort focuses on subdividing the major project deliverables and project work into smaller, more  manageable work packages.
• Verification – The verification activity creates the formal acceptance process for all project deliverables.
• Control – The control process defines how all proposed project changes will be processed. This includes the proposal submission, review, and approval processes.

How Visual Communications Can Help

Visual communications provides many things that project managers can take advantage of in all the scope management activities. In general this includes:

• Excellent facilitation of communication across discipline without using jargon.
• Easy translation to different cultures for geographically dispersed and co-sourced projects.
• Accelerated comprehension by most stakeholders.
• Increased communication which facilitates teambuilding among those unfamiliar with the intricacies of your work.
• Requires that you summarize information for easy consumption which often brings new insights and understanding to those doing the summarization.

It’s the last point that I would like to elaborate on in this post using the visual example on the left. (Click on the thumbnail to see an enlarged version.) 

This example happens to be in the context of a money manager in the financial services sector but could be modified to apply to almost any industry or business.

One of the most important steps in scope management is creating the project scope statement. This is the place where I feel visual tools can have the greatest impact for good. In the case of this example, I created a simple, but comprehensive table that presented the teams within a department against the key functions, applications, information, and data used by each team. For those of you following this blog I took the key function information from the relationship maps developed in an earlier analysis phase and put them into the highest level of the table. I inserted all the other information that was collected and documented in the team overviews from work that was done in earlier projects.

One of the strengths of this table is that it provides a good summary of everything we knew about the department on one page. All of the advantages we have been discussing about one-page diagrams apply here as well.

Once we have this comprehensive summary we then move on to creating the boundaries or scope for each project in the program we are working with. In doing so we add another dimension to the table without taking up more space by using color as we have discussed at lengths in other posts.

The project teams and stakeholders found this extremely helpful in understanding what each project touched. It also made it clear what each project would not do. The teams jointly adjusted boundaries or scope their projects once they were able to see everything on one page. This resulted in very clear scope for a set of very complex and interrelated projects in a large program. All of this was done in a few well-coordinated meetings.

The bottom line is visual communications can be a powerful tool in almost all stages of project scope management. The sad part is that it is often one of the most neglected tools a project manager has. The intent of this post and blog are to raise the awareness and skill levels of those who could benefit the most from adding visual communications to their tool box. It is my hope that this will result in the same successes I have realized by using these methods and principles in our work over the years. The key successes have been a higher quality of work product in a much shorter period of time.

Please study the example table and see if you can apply to your project scope efforts. I’d love to hear how this helps or any ideas, suggestions or additions to what has been said already. Just enter your comments below.