An Interdisciplinary Approach to Scoping Service Delivery

Abstract

When being considered for funding, all projects and service delivery initiatives should have a clearly defined scope. The scope for a project is formally declared in a statement of scope, which amongst other things, clearly identifies all of the outputs (deliverables) to be produced during the exercise. The scoping statement is the cornerstone of a project business case. Early in Initiation key players in a project face, what is called, “the scoping problem”: of all the alternative lists of outputs that might be proposed, which (if any) are “correct”? The scoping problem exists at two levels: one related to deciding on the list of outputs, the other related to deciding on the list of fitness-for-purpose characteristics that is to be applied to each adopted output. If not solved correctly, two situations can emerge: •A project is underscoped if its statement of scope is missing an output. If a project is underscoped it cannot generate its target outcomes (equivalent to benefits). If a project cannot generate its target outcomes, its business case cannot be realised – thus exposing it to failure. •A project is overscoped if its statement of scope includes superfluous outputs. If a project is overscoped its costs will be unnecessarily high and its timeframe will be unnecessarily long – thus making its business case less attractive. Furthermore, the eventual worth of the project will be lower than achievable – leading to underperformance of the organisation’s project investment portfolio. A reliable scoping statement is a precondition for estimation of a project’s costs and duration, which require in logical sequence: estimates of resources, a comprehensive model of the work involved and a scoping statement. Conventional approaches to projects assume that the issue of scope has been decided in other forums that lie outside the project proper and so the focus of their attention is on how to produce the outputs that have been decided elsewhere. PRINCE2 (OGS, 2007) acknowledges a necessary relationship between outputs and benefits, but fails to explain a mechanism linking the two. Aside from a general agreement that outputs need to somehow contribute to the project’s goals, little is provided in the existing literature by way of tools and techniques to solve the scoping problem. Organisations appear to address this issue by simply adopting arbitrary lists of outputs for initiatives – or by making intuitive judgements about whether particular outputs should be in or out of scope. When a project is eventually completed, the benefits that flow will be completely determined by the outputs that have been produced. If outputs were set arbitrarily in the scoping statement, then benefits will be equally arbitrary and so the resulting net worth of the exercise may or may not make for a sensible investment. Clearly such approaches expose projects to unreliable scoping. Following the high complexity of scoping service delivery, the objective of this research is to develop an interdisciplinary approach to project scoping: this approach will be based on effective models from the areas of Organisational Behaviour, Strategic Management, General Management and Operations Management.