Project Management Class: Scope

Just so any regular readers are aware, these certain posts will be concerning a course I'm taking. Its required that I create a blog about each section we learn about. Which is why I'm showing this here.

So again, for anyone who checks for updates on videos, this will be completely unrelated.

Now for the actual post.

This week we finally got to a section that didn't completely feel like we had covered it before. How to design and plan out the scope of a project.
The main thing I got out of it was that involved finding out the purpose and constraints of a project. Which of course means more planning is required. Not that huge of a step from the whole initial planning section. To be perfectly honest its almost exactly the same. Though at least this time we're talking in a more practical sense than before, or at least that is how I feel about it.

Its pretty self explanatory, which is most likely part of the reason it was mashed together with another chapter. That and we've missed the last 2 or 3 classes due to weather, not much of a choice there. In any case, figuring out the scope of a project mainly consisted of finding out what it requires and what the goals are. There are a few other obvious things such as the deadline and the budget allowed, all of which combines into what everyone can see as the "scope" of the project. As I said, pretty self explanatory.
Putting all of those pieces together was a bit more complicated however. It involves a "Work Breakdown Structure" or chart of some kind to organize everything. There are four versions of of a Work Breakdown Structure: Top-Down where the larger items are broken down, Bottom-Up where you start from the smaller pieces and organize them into larger ones, Mind Mapping which uses a chart where every item branches from a topic or idea, and Analogy which really just references other Work Breakdown Structures and gets inspired from there. All of these have advantages in certain situations and some find it easier to try one approach over others. From here, organizing and determining the scope of a project is simplified and easier to comprehend.

This was the most important piece of info I learned when it came to this section of the class so far. Organizing and planning out what a project is seemed to be more practical than everything before. But then again I mentioned "so far", there's a very good chance this will be overshadowed by something else a lot more important. Or at least interesting.