As a project manager, one of your key responsibilities will be ensuring that your project is on track for success. While this may seem like a simple enough task, it actually requires a deep understanding of the many varying and often complex components required to achieve each of your project objectives. 

To get clear on exactly what needs to be achieved and the work that needs to be done to successfully deliver your project, you’ll need to spend some time scoping your project.

What is Scoping?

Scoping is a software development process that consists of determining and documenting your project’s goals, deliverables, tasks, budgets, and deadlines. Accurately scoping your project is important because it will:

• Communicate what the project entails
• Provide your team and stakeholders with an understanding of exactly what's involved. 
• Provide a roadmap that can be used to assign tasks, schedule work, and budget appropriately
• Prevent your project from expanding beyond the established vision
  

In order to keep your team on track, it’s important that you provide them with a guide to all facets of the project's scope- including tasks to be completed and the resources needed to achieve those tasks. This can be done in a project scope statement that will serve as a definitive guideline for making project-related decisions. This document should include:

• Boundaries of the project including time and budget
• Responsibilities of team
• Procedures that must be followed
• The expected outcome of the project.
• Constraints that limit your options for developing a solution. 
• Internal and external entities with which the project team will interface.How Do I Scope My Project?
  

How do I Scope My Project?

Step 1: Information Gathering

You’ll want to begin by gathering all of the project documentation you’ve created up to this point - this might include a vision brief, user journey map, project roadmap, and more. 

From these documents you’ll want to compile all of the requirements you have for the project - for example, will the app be mobile or web-based - or both? What features will the app include? What types of technologies will the app need to integrate with? Try to be as specific and accurate as possible - the more detailed your requirements, the more accurate your scope will be. 

Step 2: Outline the Big Pieces of the Project 

Once you have a list of wants and needs it’s time to create an extensive outline of all of the project's larger components. As an example, if you’re building a mobile app, you’d create a high-level list of all the elements that need to be built including the app’s backend, designs, integrations etc. 

Step 3: Break It Down Into Small Tasks 

Next, you’ll take each of the large pieces of work that you defined in the previous step and break them down into smaller tasks, called user stories. Each of these user stories should be small enough that they will take no more than a couple of days to complete. In our experience, if you estimate that a piece of work will take more than a few days to complete it’s likely that you haven’t broken your tasks down far enough, and your time estimation will likely be faulty.

In this example, we’ve broken down “Authentication” - a large piece of work -  into the following small, single tasks.

Step 4: Estimate With Points

As you can see in the example above, each task has been assigned “points”. These points correspond to the complexity of the task, or how difficult it will be to complete the task.

To estimate the amount of time it will take to complete your project you’ll want to create a spreadsheet that contains all of the tasks you’ll need to complete in order to finish the project, with corresponding points for each task. You can then use the total amount of points to calculate how many weeks it will take to complete your project.

Step 5: Ask Clarifying Questions

Once you’ve completed the spreadsheet detailed in the previous step, it’s time to go back and share it with everyone involved in the project (the client, designers, developers, etc). At this time you can clear up any questions or concerns you have, ask for clarity on tasks that you may not have been able to break down completely and get opinions on complexity or potential areas of difficulty from those who will be working on specific areas of the project, such as designers or developers.

Step 6: Revise and Get a Second Opinion

Based on the information you gathered in Step 5, you’ll now create a revised version of your budget and the scope of tasks that you created. Make sure to have at least one person take a look at this revision and provide their input to help ensure that it’s as accurate as possible. 

Step 7: Identify Your Riskiest Assumptions

Once you’ve revised your scope you’ll want to go through and identify your riskiest assumptions. As an example, imagine that the app you’re building requires a third party integration of some sort -  but unfortunately, you haven’t been able to get documentation that details how that integration will work. In this instance it will be difficult for you to accurately estimate the complexity of the task at hand, and this should be noted.

When your project has tasks where you’ve made risky assumptions, it’s always a good idea to have your design and development team tackle those tasks first, in order to clear up any ambiguities in the project's scope. This will allow you to get any misaligned expectations out of the way at the beginning of the project. 

Step 8: Add  Buffer - Things Will Go Wrong 

No matter how diligent you are about detailing and pointing your tasks, things will always go wrong causing some tasks to take far longer than you had anticipated. For this reason you should always add buffer, or extra time, to your estimates. 

Make sure you are deliberate and transparent about the areas to which you are adding buffer, and to only add buffer to the tasks and areas where there might be some ambiguity about complexity or your ability to complete that task without issue. 

Step 9: Deprioritize Scope if Needed 

Sometimes you might run up against constraints that you have no control over - the client might have a deadline that is earlier than you’ve estimated - or perhaps they don’t have the budget for everything that you’ve scoped in the project. In these cases you’ll need to go through your scope and prioritize exactly what needs to be (or can be) completed given these constraints, and de-prioritize those tasks that aren’t crucial to this phase of the project. 

Tips for Estimating Your Project

Estimating Doesn’t Stop Once the Project Starts 

Once you’ve estimated your project and started design & development work on its features, it’s inevitable that more user stories (tasks) will be added to the scope. In order to keep track of exactly where you are in your timeline, it’s important that you continuously track the tasks that you’ve added or subtracted from the project, and to re-estimate the project as necessary. ‍

Beware of 3rd Parties

When you are scoping and estimating your project it’s extremely important that you determine very early on which 3rd parties you’ll be using, and that you get their documentation as quickly as possible - it’s always wise to assume that integrating with these 3rd parties will not be simple. Specifically, it’s important that you take a look at their API’s and SDK’s - and it’s a good idea to schedule a chat with their customer service team. ‍

New Technologies Need More Buffer

If your project will require you to use a technology you are unfamiliar with, you should take this into consideration when scoping and estimating the project. Even if there is only one person on your team who is unfamiliar with the technology, their learning curve can significantly slow down your process. 

Design Never Fits Neatly Inside Your Estimates

If your project consists of both design and development, you should be aware that the design process will never fit neatly into your initial estimates. Generally speaking, once you get into the design process lots of new ideas will be generated, which will change your initial estimates and scope.

Estimate and Account for Bugs

Bugs will come up during your development process. While this is inevitable, making sure to account for them in your estimates will allow you to remain on track and transparent with your stakeholders. 

Everyone Has a Different Velocity Makeup 

When you’re estimating your project it’s important to keep in mind that each of your team members have different strengths and weaknesses. Spend some time considering the tasks at hand and the team members who will be completing them - this will allow you to be more accurate in your estimations. 

Reset Expectations Constantly

Make sure you are consistently checking in with your stakeholders, executives, clients etc, and letting them know what is going on within the project, including changes in estimates and scope. It’s easy to let these conversations slide, but remaining transparent will always benefit the project and the relationships within it. 

Responsive? Cross-Platform? Browser Support? Poor Internet? Offline?

There are always a whole slew of things that you often don’t think about until you get to the tail end of a project - things such as “Does it look ok on a smaller screen size?”, “Have I tested how it looks on both iOS and Android?”, “Do we want the app to work offline?”. These tasks can add up to a few extra weeks at the end of a project, so it’s best to try and factor in as many of these tasks as possible when scoping and estimating your project. 

Did I Forget Simple Things That Take Time But Are Not Complex?

Make sure to think about all of the little things that will need to be done in order for your project to be complete. Common tasks that are often overlooked include creating privacy policy pages, creating footers or navigation bars, creating a password reset functionality, setting up email notifications, etc. 

Embrace Healthy Conflict and Disappointing People

Disappointing people is no fun - unfortunately it’s something we all have to deal with from time to time. If you come across an area you haven’t scoped or estimated correctly it’s important to bring it up to the stakeholders and executives immediately.