Project Management Tip of the Week - 15th September 2022

Hello, Jasmine here from LVL Up Consulting with this week's project management tip of the week. And this week I want to talk all about pre-project scoping. So this is I think, an essential step that needs to happen before any project is initiated. And it's often overlooked. I do find particularly when I'm doing project advisory that a lot of projects that fail or are going down a slippery slope, haven't been properly scoped to begin with.

So what do you need to do? Of course you need to have a really solid set of business requirements. And you can either bring in a business analyst to do that, or you can do it yourself. My hot tip for if you are trying to do business requirements is to meet with the people that are impacted by the change, go to the facility, watch them in their natural habitat. If that's customers or your employees sit with them, observe, that's how you'll figure out the real requirements, not just ones, that you've thought of sitting in an office.

The other part of pre-project scoping, that's really important is the business case. And it doesn't have to be War & Peace, it doesn't have to be a thesis. But it is a document that says exactly what you're trying to achieve, when you're trying to achieve it and how on earth it's viable and feasible to even do this project. Of course a business case should be rubber stamped by a project sponsor or a project board before it is initiated. And you don't need to do all of this incredibly formally. You, you can do it really quickly. But as long as you've documented the requirements and the business case, then you are 10 steps ahead of where you're gonna be to launch this project and to get started on initiating it in the project management plan. Of course it doesn't matter if you're doing PRINCE2 style of project management or Agile you always come back to that project management plan and to that business case, to validate if those requirements are still relevant, but you need them there to have a baseline.

So that is why pre-project scoping is incredibly important. And you should prioritize it before you kick off a project. I will see you next week for my next project management tip.