Chapter 3 - Scoping the Business Problem

Scoping the Business Problem

This chapter concludes the importance of knowing and determining the scope, stakeholders, and goals.  The Volere process model, describes the first activity as Project Blastoff where key factors that, taken together, determine the viability of the requirements project. 

Project Blastoff

The blastoff identifies the boundary of the work area and determines the purpose the product is to fulfill. It also identifies the stakeholders—those people who have an interest in the success of the product. The main purpose of a blastoff is to lay the groundwork so the requirements discovery for a project is efficient and effective. The blastoff produces a number of deliverables.
The main Project Blastoff deliverables that are needed to be determined are:

• Purpose of the project: This explains what the product is ought to do and what kind if benefits it is required to bring to the business.  This justifies the project and serves as a focus for the requirements discovery process.  
•  The scope of the work: The business area affected by the installation of the product. It is needed to understand and specify the most appropriate product.
• The stakeholders: This group includes anyone who interest in the product and has some influence on the outcome or has knowledge needed to uncover the requirements for the product.
•  Constraints: This includes the time and money available for the project and other limitations on the scope or style of the product and include predetermined design solutions that must be used, constraints on changing the way that business processes are currently implemented, 
• Names: Any special terminology to be used in this project.
• Relevant facts and assumptions: These are any special facts people need to know or any assumptions being made that may affect the outcome of the project.
• The estimated cost: Some of the deliverables from the blastoff provide input to the estimating process and allow fairly good estimates to be made early in the project. This is not really a requirements issue, but as the requirements deliverables are prime input, your project management will thank you for it. 
•  The risks: Another deliverable includes short risk analysis to reveal the main risks faced by the project. Someone skilled at risk assessment should perform this.  

The Formality Guide

The rabbit, horse, and elephant projects relate to formality and their differences are as follows.

•  Rabbit projects will probably have only a brief blastoff meeting at best, with most of the blastoff data is obtained from other informal conversations with the stakeholders. However, documenting the work scope is really important.
• Horse projects should be more formal and hold a blastoff meeting; they should also record their deliverables and communicate them to the appropriate stakeholders. Horse projects might make a rough-sketch to ensure all stakeholders understand where the project is headed. 
• Elephant Projects needs the blastoff deliverables completely determined before moving
• further in the product development process. In most cases, the deliverables are discovered during meetings with the key stakeholders, and the results are recorded and distributed. Elephant projects are critical, and costly if they make errors. So, risk analysis and cost estimation are important to elephant projects and to have a clear work scope.

Setting The Scope

 To set up the scope, you only need to examine the part of the business that will change when the product is installed or is intended to build. You need to know which parts of the business are included in the work, and which parts can be safely excluded. 

The image below illustrates the relationship between different scopes: the scope of the work, the scope of the entire organization within the outside world, and the potential scopes of the product that project has to build.