Cogenitive

I dusted off an old project definition & scoping tool today to help communicate scope to users & executive sponsors.  This dates back 10+ years to a methodology that was developed by a little management consulting company I worked for after business school – Axiom Inc (later bought by Cambridge Technology Partners).

I’ve never encountered this anywhere else, although I’m sure it’s not a totally original idea.  The basic concept is to categorize distinct functional requirements into groupings and put them in order of priority.  Structuring the resulting data into a matrix and drawing a zig zag line through the matrix to indicate the cutoff for items in and out of scope offers a concise presentation of scope for a project.

One of the major benefits of the presentation is that it concentrates attention on the marginal items.  As with most portfolio management problems, most people will agree on the top priority items and the lowest priority items, but will struggle to come to agreement on the stuff in the middle.  You don’t want to waste valuable meeting time on discussion of things on which everyone agrees – you want to cut straight to a review of areas where there may be disagreement.

At Axiom, part of the scoping methodology was to include an assessment of the effort required for each area.  Granted that early in the process these numbers are pretty fuzzy, you can generally at least get to a small/medium/large categorization, and attaching effort ranges to these categories allows you to do some scenario analysis.  With a little Excel magic, you can even build a tool to calculate total estimated effort as you adjust in scope/out of scope decisions on individual functional items.

This entry was posted on July 3, 2008 at 9:30 pm and is filed under Business Analysis, Project Management. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.