What is project scope? Defining and outlining project success

Clearly defining your project’s scope helps to effectively manage stakeholder expectations and ensures that all of the project’s elements are aligned with the objectives — increasing the chances of success. Here’s what you need to know about defining project scope.

Project scope definition
Project scope is a detailed outline of all aspects of a project, including all related activities, resources, timelines, and deliverables, as well as the project’s boundaries. A project scope also outlines key stakeholders, processes, assumptions, and constraints, as well as what the project is about, what is included, and what isn’t. All of this essential information is documented in a scope statement.

The project scope statement  
The project scope statement is a key document that provides all stakeholders with a clear understanding of why the project was initiated and defines its key goals. Most project scope statements will include these elements.

• A project statement of work (SoW), which is a detailed breakdown of all work to be performed by a project team and any important elements that may impact the outcome
• Constraints that might limit or negatively impact the outcome of the project, including resources, procurement issues, timing, or lack of information
• Scope exclusions, which can be anything that will not be part of the project or its deliverables
• Milestones that provide the exact date that something will be delivered or completed
• The final deliverables that will be provided to the customer at the end of the project — for example, a report, a software feature, any process insights or analysis, or any product or service that a customer needs
• Acceptance criteria that spell out exactly how success will be measured
• Final approval whereby the customer will sign-off on the scope statement confirming that all parameters have been included and the document is complete and accurate

Key steps for defining your project scope

Properly defining the scope of a project is the key to successfully managing your project. Here are the steps you can follow to define your project scope.

Work with key stakeholders to define and create a scope statement by identifying what is within scope, and out of scope. Collaborating with stakeholders helps to ensure essential things do not fall through the cracks.

Identify, document, and communicate assumptions. Assumptions are those elements that relate to the project that are assumed to be true for the duration of the project. Assumptions are necessary to provide an estimate of the cost and schedule to deliver the project’s scope during the planning phase of a project.

Gain buy-in for the scope statement with the stakeholders who are most impacted to ensure that everyone is on the same page.

Project scope example

Let’s say you are a project manager defining the scope for a content marketing project. A very simple project scope statement might include the following.

Introduction

This content marketing project is being undertaken for XYZ company for the purpose of creating an article to be posted on their site to create brand awareness.

Project Scope

This project will include research, content strategy, writing the article, and publishing it on XYZ’s website under the XYZ blog. It will also include sharing the article on social media for the month of April 2020. All activities will be conducted by Joe Smith of ABC company.

Project Deliverables

Project deliverables will include one well-researched written article of up to 1,000 words to be delivered by email to Jane@XYZ.com no later than ___ date.    

Project Acceptance Criteria

Jane at XYZ company will review and approve the final article version before publishing.

Project Exclusions

This project will not include payment to external vendors for research or outsourced services.

Project Constraints

Constraints may include communication delays, changes in scope, or technical difficulties.

Once the project scope statement is complete and approved, and a project is underway, the project scope will need to be carefully managed to avoid scope creep.

What is scope creep?

Scrope creep refers to a scenario whereby changes occur after the project has been started and the changes are not defined or anticipated within the scope statement. When scope creep occurs, it can negatively impact the project timeline, deliverable quality, resources, budget, and other aspects. Managing the scope of your project can help avoid unwelcome surprises.

Project scope management

In addition to the ongoing review and monitoring of project activities, there are steps that should be undertaken to manage the scope of the project to avoid scope creep.

Identify whether there are any changes to the requirements for your project. This is a vital step since these changes directly affect the project goals and all related activities.

Identify how the changes will impact the project. Before you can make adjustments to the scope of the project, you need to understand where and how changes impact the outcome.

Gain approval for changes before proceeding with a change in activities or direction.

Implement the approved changes in a timely manner to reduce delays and risks.

Project scope template

                         [Project Title] – Project Scope                                   

Introduction

The Introduction provides a high-level overview of the project.

Project Scope

State the scope of the project. This should include what the project does and does not include. This will help to clarify what is included in the project and help to avoid any confusion from project team members and stakeholders.

Project Deliverables

State the planned deliverables for the project.         

Project Acceptance Criteria

Define the acceptance criteria. What objectives will be met, and how will success be measured?

Project Exclusions

What is not included in the scope of this project.

Project Constraints

Provide any constraints on the project, hard dates, staff or equipment limitations, financial or budget constraints, or any technical limitations. 

Developing a solid understanding of a project’s purpose and clearly defining, documenting, and managing your project scope, you can ensure that you are well-positioned to deliver a successful project without having to deal with scope creep.

https://www.cio.com

Is COVID-19 a ‘Forcing Function’ for Cloud Native?

The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic is causing significant ripples throughout organizations that have had to rapidly upend economic market where anything that is not essential is being tossed aside. However, for those in the midst of a digital transformation journey, such tossing can’t be done as haphazardly.

During a panel discussion at this week’s Software Circus digital event, Kelsey Hightower, staff developer advocate at Google Cloud, used the term “forcing function” to describe how the current health crisis is forcing organizations to make technology decisions. He explained that organizations have typically only made hard decisions when an outside force required immediate actions.

“I think for COVID-19, it was a big forcing function,” Hightower said. “You don’t get to ask for six months, you don’t get to ask for an 18-month delay, it’s not up to you, actually. It is what it is and you have no choice. So once you take the choices off the table I think that’s what forces people to innovate.”

Hightower added that while some people might do their best work while procrastinating, the COVID-19 situation means “nope, you got to pick one. No one’s going into the office so you have to choose. … This is not a decision you can make in the next 18 months. Buy one now and then learn how to use it. So you need that forcing function.”

Jamie Dobson, CEO of Container Solutions, concurred, adding that organizations will find this sort of timing pressure a necessary evil.

“Without that forcing function, there is no rabbit hole to go through. You will not find the chaos. Nobody does this. Nobody moves to cloud native unless there’s a good [reason],” Dobson said.

Hightower did note that while organizations are feeling this pressure to decide, it should be less a decision on how or why to innovate toward cloud native and more on just what tools they should be using to make that pivot.

“Most companies are not really struggling with the ability to innovate,” Hightower said. “A lot of the stuff that they’re going to use are tools and there was innovation that went into producing those tools. The innovative thing that we’re asking companies to do is just pick a tool, literally pick one of the 10 and as soon as you pick one then that will be the most innovative thing that some companies do in a long time. Literally picking something. Not building the thing. Not actually knowing how to actually leverage it 100%. Sometimes the biggest hurdle for most companies is just the picking part.”

https://www.sdxcentral.com/

Why didn’t COVID-19 break the internet?

Just a few months into its fifty-first year, the internet has proven its flexibility and survivability. 

In the face of a rapid world-wide traffic explosion from private, public and government entities requiring employees to work from home to help curb the spread of the coronavirus, some experts were concerned the bandwidth onslaught might bring the internet to its knees. All indications are that while there have been hot spots, the internet infrastructure has held its own so far – a silver lining of sorts in dreadful situation.

Evidence of the increased traffic is manifold:

• Video on Verizon’s network is up 41%, VPN usage is up 65%, and there’s been a tenfold increase in collaboration tool usage, said Andrés Irlando, senior vice president and president at Verizon’s public sector division.  
• Downstream traffic has increased up to 20% and upstream traffic has up to 40% during the last two months, according to Cox Communications CTO Kevin Hart. “To keep ahead of the traffic we have been executing on our long-term plan that stays 12-18 months ahead of demand curves. We’ve had to scramble to stay ahead but 99% of our nodes are healthy,” he said.
• The DE-CIX (the Deutsche Commercial Internet Exchange) in Frankfurt set a new world record for data throughput on in early March hitting more than 9.1 Terabits per/second. Never before has so much data been exchanged at peak times at an Internet Exchange, the DE-CIX stated.

How is the internet handling this situation?

First, what does the internet look like? It consists of access links that move traffic from individual connected devices to high-bandwidth routers that move traffic from its source over the best available path toward its destination using TCP/IP. The core that it travels through is made up of individual high-speed fiber-optic networks that peer with each other to create the internet backbone.

The individual core networks are privately owned by Tier 1 internet service providers (ISP), giant carriers whose networks are tied together. These providers include AT&T, CenturyLink, Cogent Communications, Deutsche Telekom, GTT Communications, NTT Communications, Sprint, Tata Communications, Telecom Italia Sparkle, Telia Carrier, and Verizon. 

These backbone ISPs connect their networks at peering points, neutrally owned facilities with high-speed switches and routers that move traffic among the peers. These are often owned by third parties, sometimes non-profits, that help unifying the backbone.

The backbone infrastructure relies on the fastest routers, which can deliver 100Gbps trunk speeds. Internet equipment is made by variety of vendors including Cisco, Extreme, Huawei, Juniper, and Nokia.

Cisco said it has been analyzing traffic statistics with major carriers across Asia, Europe, and the Americas, and its data shows that typically, the most congested point in the network occurs at inter-provider peering points, Jonathan Davidson, senior vice president and general manager of Cisco’s Mass-Scale Infrastructure Group, wrote in a blog on March 26.

“Our analysis at these locations shows an increase in traffic of 10% to [41%] over normal levels. In every country [with peering points in Hong Kong, Italy and France and Russia seeing the biggest traffic jumps], traffic spiked with the decision to shut down non-essential businesses and keep people at home. Since then, traffic has remained stable or has experienced a slight uptick over the days that followed,” Davidson stated.

While overall the story has been positive, the situation hasn’t been perfect. There have been a variety of outages, according to traffic watchers at ThousandEyes, which writes weekly reports on outages among ISPs, cloud providers and conferencing services. Globally, the number  of outages to ISPs hit a record high of  250 during the week of April 20-26, 124 of the in the U.S.The number of outages is the most since the end of March, but two issues – fiber cuts in CenturyLink’s network and a broad Tata Communications outage – helped push that number up. Typically though,  these problems have not been caused by networks being overwhelmed with traffic.

Resilient by design

Network planning, traffic engineering and cutting-edge equipment can take most of the credit for the internet’s ability to adjust in times of need.

“IP was built to last through any sort of disaster, and the core was built to live through almost anything,” Davidson said. “Over the years there has been a tremendous amount if infrastructure and CAPEX spending to build out this massive network. We are no longer in the days of the wild west of years ago; the internet is a critical resource and the expectations are much higher.”

Indeed, the principle of over-building capacity is one of the key reasons the internet has performed so well. “Network capacity is critical. Our network team and engineers have been able to keep the same amount of capacity or headroom on our networks during this crisis,” said Verizon’s Irlando. “We continue to augment capacity and connectivity.”

“There was some anxiety as traffic began to ramp up at the start. We’ve seen a 35% increase in internet traffic – but ultimately the networks have handled it quite well,” said Andrew Dugan, chief technology officer at CenturyLink.

Internet planning actually took into account the demands a pandemic would place on the network, Dugan said. “CenturyLink and other providers began developing pandemic plans more than a decade ago, and we knew that part of the response would rely significantly on our infrastructure,” he said.

People who build large IP networks engineer them for unexpected congestion, he said.  Dugan pointed to three factors that are helping the internet successfully support the increased volume of traffic:

• Networks are built with redundancy to handle fiber cuts and equipment failures. This means creating capacity headroom to support sudden disasters.
• Network monitoring helps operators anticipate where congestion is occurring, allowing them to move traffic to less congested paths.
• ISPs have been building out networks for years to account for increasing demand, and planning specifications help prevent networks from reaching capacity

When building fiber backbones, ISPs often bury the cabling to protect it from storms and accidents that can take down above-ground power grids. Since much of the cost of deploying the cable is in the labor to dig the trenches, while they’re at it, most ISPs install more fiber strands  than they have a current use for, according to ISP OTELCO. This so-called dark fiber can take the form of additional cables or cables with unused fiber strands within them that optical switches can light up quickly as the need arises.

“We had some infrastructure segments that ran hot,” Dugan said about the COVID-19 spike in traffic on CenturyLink’s network, “but we are fiber-based so we quickly were able to add capacity.” And ISPs are adding more fiber all the time, which “is key to ensuring networks can meet growing demands and provide support in times of crisis, like these,” Dugan said.

The shifting last mile

Fiber may be commonplace in the largest internet backbones, but it is much less so in the last-mile connections that reach homes. While fiber is the fastest home internet option by far, availability is still scattered in the US, according to Broadbandnow. Due to the high cost of installing fiber service directly to homes, ISP connections are still predominantly served by coax cable TV services even major cities. Chicago, for example, only has 21% fiber availability as of 2020. Dallas has about 61%, and that's actually high compared to other major metros in the US, the company stated.

When work-at-home orders came down in March, the source of internet traffic shifted dramatically. Rather than coming from business sites connected by high-bandwidth links, suddenly significant amounts of traffic was coming from private homes, dumping more traffic onto the access networks during what would otherwise be off-peak hours.

It was a significant enough issue that AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson noted it during the company’s first-quarter financial call with analysts. “What we are seeing is the volumes of network usage moving out of urban and into suburban areas… and we are seeing heavy, heavy volume on the networks out of homes,” Stephenson said. Work-at-home employees, students doing online classwork and online shopping added to the load.

But as CenturyLink’s Dugan noted, the work from home activity is generally happening during the day while peak internet usage continues to occur in the evening when people generally consume video and gaming. This has helped balance out the additional internet use.

In addition, traffic engineering may be able to find less congested routes if the traffic load gets too great. When that’s not possible, providers have to look elsewhere. For example, U.S. Cellular boosted its mobile broadband capacity in six states by borrowing wireless spectrum for 60 days from other carriers who owned the licenses for those spectrum bands.

AI and automation help dodge issues

Other attributes have helped the internet’s performance as well. For example, AT&T said its artificial intelligence is helping remotely troubleshoot problems with customer equipment and identify issues before they become problems. “We’ve expedited deployments of new AI capabilities in certain markets that will allow us to balance the traffic load within a sector and across sectors to help avoid overloading specific cells and improve the experience,” AT&T stated.

Increased use of automation has also had an impact by enabling network engineers to quickly manage traffic, Dugan said. “Service providers who invested in software-defined networking prior to the coronavirus crisis may have been more responsive to changing traffic patterns than ones that are still using legacy or hybrid networks,” Dugan said.

Going forward Verizon’s Irlando said he doesn’t think current internet traffic levels are the new normal. “No one knows the future, but we will not have 90% of America working from home,” he said.

One indication of remote-worker impact comes from a Gartner survey of 317 CFOs and finance leaders in March that said 74% of businesses will move at least 5% of their previously on-site workforce to permanently remote positions post-COVID-19.

Cox’s Hart says the situation underscores the need to continue investing in the backbone. He says his company will spend $10 billion over the next five years to build out network capacity, improve access, drive higher speeds and improve latency and security.

Internet access isn’t universal

There is one overarching problem the COVID-19 crisis is shining a light on: the digital divide. For an estimated 3.7 billion people worldwide, internet access is either unavailable or too expensive, and that is palpable when connectivity to the outside world becomes essential. 

“Internet access has become increasingly vital to our health, safety, and economic and societal survival. As cities and countries across the globe ask their citizens to stay at home, billions of us are fortunate enough to be able to heavily rely on the internet to fill the gaps in our work and life,” wrote Tae Yoo, senior vice president of Cisco Corporate Affairs in a blog about the digital divide.

“There is no silver bullet on how to solve this problem,” Dan Rabinovitsj, vice president of connectivity with FaceBook. "It’s going to take a lot in investment and innovation from network operators to drive costs out of the ecosystem so that they can pour more money back into the network," he said.  “Infrastructure is having its moment right now, everyone is depending on it,” Rabinovitsj said.

“The internet is moving from huge to absolutely massive. It’s moving from being critical to being essential to economies, businesses and governments,” Cisco’s Davidson said. “As a result of COVID-19, we’re getting a glimpse of what the internet of the future is today,” Davidson said.   

https://www.networkworld.com/