PMP Certification: Project Scope Management Terms


Project Scope Management is the second knowledge area of project management.

It includes a group of processes that define and control what is and is not included in the project.

Based on chapter 5 of PMBOK® Guide 5th Edition, here you will find:

  • project management graphic of Project Scope Management, a quick reference guide to its key terms
  • Project Scope Management key terms — by Project Scope Management processes

Read on!

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Project Scope Management Terms

by Project Management Process Group

1. Plan Scope Management

  • Product Scope. Features and functions that characterize a product, service or result.
  • Project Scope. Work performed to deliver the product, service, or result with the specified features and functions.
  • Project Charter. It provides the high-level project description and product characteristics from the project statement of work.
  • Scope Management Plan. A component of the project or program management plan that describes how the scope will be defined, developed, monitored, controlled, and verified.
  • Requirements Management Plan. A component of the project management plan that describes how requirements will be analyzed, documented, and managed.

2. Collect Requirements

  • Context Diagrams. A visual depiction of the product’s scope by showing a business system (process, equipment, computer system, etc.), and how people and systems (actors) interact with it.
  • Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis. A decision matrix to provide a systematic analytical approach for establishing criteria, such as risk levels, uncertainty, and valuation, to evaluate and rank ideas.
  • Facilitated Workshop Techniques. Joint Application Development—improving the software development process— and Quality Function Deployment—determine critical characteristics of new product development.

3. Define Scope

  • Organizational Process Assets. Lessons learned from previous projects and formal and informal policies, procedures, plans and guidelines of any and all of the organizations involved in the project whose effects must be considered.
  • Project Scope Statement. Contains the following elements:
    • The project’s deliverables and the work required to create them
    • A common understanding of Scope among Stakeholders
    • Explicit scope exclusions
    • Provides a basis to determine if changes in project scope are contained within or outside the project’s boundaries.

4. Create Work Breakdown Structure

  • Decomposition. A technique used for dividing and subdividing the project scope and project deliverables into smaller, more manageable parts.
  • Work Breakdown Structure – WBS. Deliverable-oriented grouping of the project elements that organizes and defines the total scope of the project: work not in WBS is not in scope.
  • Work Breakdown Structure Templates. A work breakdown structure from a previous project with similar deliverables and project life cycle.

6. Control Scope

  • Performance Reports. Documents that provide organized and summarized work performance, earned value management parameters and calculations, and analyses of project work progress work status.
  • Scope Change Control System. Procedures by which project scope may be changed: paperwork, tracking systems and approval levels necessary for authorization.
  • Scope Changes. Any modification to the agreed-upon project scope as defined by the approved WBS. Often require changes to cost, time, quality, or other project objectives.
  • Corrective Action. Anything done to bring expected future project performance into line with the project plan.
  • Adjusted Baseline. The nature of the change may require that the corresponding baseline document be revised and reissued to reflect the approved change & form the new baseline for future changes.


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