Project management is a complex process, but one of the most important steps is also one of the simplest: creating a project scope document. This document outlines the goals, deliverables, tasks, and deadlines of a project, and it serves as a roadmap for everyone involved.
In this article, we'll explain what project scoping is, why it's important, and how to write a project scope document that’ll help you successfully manage your projects.
What is project scoping?
A scope is the total amount of time and work that's needed to complete a specific project. To do this, you need to define the project budget or costs, goals, deliverables, tasks, and deadlines.
Once you know what's included in the project, defining the scope should be a collaborative effort that's mutually agreed upon by you and your team—before any work begins on the project.
To formalize this, create a project scoping statement that can be signed and retained for easy referencing. This is a document that works alongside your statement of work to support the project management process and set reasonable stakeholder expectations.
Why is project scoping important?
Project scoping is important for several reasons. It helps you:
- Set more reasonable and achievable project goals
- Improve efficiency
- Set reasonable budgets or better cost estimates for your team
- Articulate what’s involved in the project to key stakeholders so it is easier for them to understand and refer back to
- Ensure all team members are aligned and focused on agreed objectives or project deliverables
- Prevent the project from expanding beyond the agreed scope
- Provide a roadmap that managers or project owners can use for scheduling and delegating tasks among the team
How to write a project scoping document
Writing a project scope document is a simple process, but it's important to follow a few key steps to ensure that your document is comprehensive and effective.
1. Define the project objectives
Every successful project has an overarching objective—it provides the “why?” and “so what?” to the work you conduct. It also helps to keep everyone focused and aligned towards a common goal.
Defining what you want to achieve throughout the project life cycle provides important context for you, your team, and your stakeholders. This should be the first step in any project planning process, as it gives clarity to later steps in finalizing the scope of the project.
Without a clear objective, it can be easy for the project to veer off track or lose sight of its purpose.
2. Get input from your team
Your team is your most important asset and effective knowledge source. They’re the ones with the relevant experience—they can tell you how long specific tasks typically take and how different deliverables relate to one another. Lean into your team for:
- Realistic timeframes and goals
- Project expectations, particularly concerning feedback from your team
- Exclusions—has a stakeholder asked for something that’d normally fall outside of the scope for this type of project?
With your team’s input, setting project milestones and a reasonable roadmap or timeline becomes much easier.
Tools like Dropbox Paper make it easy for your project team to collaborate on scoping documents. Team members can add comments to ask questions directly on the Paper doc, improving communication and group understanding of the project that's being scoped.
And when your team works together in Dropbox, all project-related materials are kept safe in one centralized place.
3. Define the project milestones and roadmap
Milestones give a clear structure to your project and are one of the most important elements to your scope of work. They serve as checkpoints that help stakeholders track progress and ensure the project stays on schedule.
Stakeholders can refer to the project scope document for clarity on when key parts of the project will be delivered, when meetings will occur, and other important steps in the project. You can then map this onto a timeline or roadmap with clear start and end dates for the project as a whole, and deadlines for specific tasks or deliverables.
Having an outline for milestones or deadlines can also help prevent scope creep—when project requirements or deliverables start to increase over time and exceed the original project scope. With a clear workflow and procedure for project delivery and sign-off, project stakeholders can better identify potential risks or issues early on and make adjustments to the roadmap before things escalate.
To speed up the project scoping process, Dropbox Paper has a range of free templates that are ready to go for a range of different project types—from launch plans and product roadmaps to content calendars and video production plans.
4. Organize the relevant information
Once you’ve gathered all of the details and input from those who’ll be working on the project, it’s time to piece it all together into your project scope document.
Key details to include:
- The project name and description
- The deadline
- The manager or project owner
- Other team members working on the project and their roles and responsibilities
- The project goal
- The deliverable(s)
- The in-scope tasks
- Any out-of-scope tasks
- Constraints and considerations
- Existing resources
Best practices for using a project scoping document
In addition to creating a project scope statement, there are a few best practices you can follow to ensure that your project scoping process is effective. These include:
- Be as specific as possible in the project scope’s details, including measurable actions for reporting on project success
- Define the key elements like the objectives and deliverables first, then work backward to fine-tune the project timeline and resource management
- Learn from previous projects to make your project scope as good as it can be
- Make it as easy as possible to get buy-in from relevant stakeholders by clearly identifying the project constraints, boundaries or exclusions, and outputs
Clear, efficient project scoping—every time
Dropbox is the ideal centralized point for storing, getting feedback on, and managing your project files. Build trust with your stakeholders by quickly sharing project updates and progress, and keeping them involved throughout the project lifecycle.
By keeping everything in one place, you and your team can streamline the project management process and spend more time focusing on developing and executing a solid project strategy—and less time chasing documents or worrying about where your project materials are saved.
