IPMA Practice Competence Element — Scope

In my last article on IPMA, I wrote about the second competence element in the Practice Area, Requirements & Objectives. In this article, I am writing on the third competence element of the Practice Area: Scope.

This competence element is to enable the individual to acquire insight into what the boundaries of the project scope are, to manage this scope and to understand how scope influences decisions regarding the management and execution of the project.

When I am facilitating the “Fundamental of Project Management”, one of the essential tasks is defining the SMART objectives, listing down what the project ‘Is’ or ‘Is Not’ and putting Assumptions and Constraints to it. These represent the scope of the project. However, scope definition goes beyond understanding what it is on paper solely. It includes what the customer wants.

A critical step after defining scope is working out the Work Breakdown Structure, the WBS. Everything in the WBS consists of the work and only the work that needs to deliver the project. Anything more will lead to unnecessary work (additional time & money) and possibly open the avenue to Scope Creep, a familiar “assassin” of a successful project.

Yet, we should not be too fixated on holding on to those scopes, which might be non-meaningful and defined too early that do not contribute to customer’s satisfaction. Depending on the project phase, we might need to work this through our Change Control Board if the project is sizable enough to have one setup.

Execution of this CE depends on the other CEs and cannot happen in a silo. The other CEs include Strategy, Compliance, Standards & Regulations, Leadership, Negotiation, Result Orientation and others.

Thank you for reading, and I hope it gives you a glimpse into this Scope CE. In my next article, I will write on the Time competence element in Practice Area.

If you are keen to know more about PMAS, you can check this link out https://pma.sg/ and follow my hashtag to learn more about the CE in IPMA Individual Competence Baseline (ICB) Version 4.0