According to Wikipedia: Project Management project scope is:
The overall definition of what the project is supposed to accomplish, and a specific description of what the end result should be or accomplish.
We can talk about what is “in-scope”, i.e. what the project is meant to delivery, and what is “out-of-scope”, i.e. what won’t be delivered.
Typically the project scope is a subset of the scope of the product under development.
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Traditional project managers are often uncomfortable with the apparently unstructured nature of agile software development. This article gives a definition of project management, and then goes on to cover traditional project management, why software development is different, how agile project management is different, and the role of an agile project manager.
According to Wikipedia: Project Management
Project Management is the discipline of planning, organizing, and managing resources to bring about the successful completion of specific project goals and objectives.
Unlike operational activities, which are on-going, a project is finite with a beginning and end. Each project is trying to achieve a clear objective and bring about change. Not surprisingly in the software development world that typically means building software. Project management has to balance scope, quality, time and budget to achieve the given objective.
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One company I worked with called the start of the project the “Blueprint” as it is about roughly shaping the project and product. “Inception” is another common term for this phase in agile projects. This article outlines traditional project initiation then delves into more detail on Agile Project Initiation.
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Risk management is about identifying, addressing, and eliminating sources of risk before they become a threat to the project. This article outlines traditional risk management, how Agile is a risk mitigation strategy, and how to do Agile risk management.
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For the last two years I have been rolling out a standard Agile approach to a department of 350. One part of the roll out strategy was to have a published standard. This was to make the goal / end-game obvious even if we didn’t initially mandate everything.
The first version of the standard, published Oct 2006, was a 50 page document. Earlier drafts had been quite short but in reviewing the document people kept asking “What does that mean?” so we’d add another section explaining it. All rather worthy but, aside from the initial reviews before publication, nobody read it. And it diluted the document as a standard, defining what must be done, as opposed to a guideline about how to do it.
We published version 2 today. This version of the standard is one page. I want to give people a simple checklist so they know whether or not they are following the standard.
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