Question

How do you balance the need to involve clients with the equally important need to freeze project scope in order to complete the project in a timely fashion

Answer 1

Answer:

Have a change control group. It should have the project manager, chief project sponsor, and senior technical and managerial people from both the sponsor/customer and project implementation teams.

There should be a protocol for requesting a change, or changing the meaning of a requirement, an impact analysis process, evaluating the need for the change, and a cost and schedule re-arrangement. Periodic meetings should be held to prioritize, accept and reject change requests. Approvals and sign-offs should be in place right from the feasibility study and requirements analysis phase.

Change requests can come both from the sponsor/customer team and the project implementation team. All should go through the same formal change control process and be documented/minuted into the project case file.

The urge to immediately start implementing the l

Answer 2

To balance such a need it is required that the managers must do proper planning.

• The project managers should spend most of their time with the client in the initial planning process of the project before freezing the scope statement.
• Initial planning is essential to balance the need to involve clients and to also hold the project scope to complete it in a timely manner.
• In first few initial meetings with the client, the company must create a rough work breakdown framework so that the customer will also have an understanding of what they want out of the project.
• Following this process, the declaration of scope should be established. In this way, the client can agree not to alter the nature of the project at all once it is specified.