Who is buying the cake then?

Whether you are engaged in incremental or step Kaizen activities, you will have lots of projects of various complexities going on in your organisation. We thought that it would be useful therefore to write some tips around basic project management to support the Kaizen community.

In this tip we look at how to manage one of the biggest killers in project management: badly defined scope.

A few weeks ago, the daughter of a friend of mine announced her engagement. My friend called me, firstly to tell me the good news but secondly to ask for some help in planning the great day. This looked like a project to me so we set about deciding who was going to do what. In effect we were defining the scope.

We agreed that the project wouldn't officially start until the couple had arranged a date with their church. We then agreed that it would be over when the final bills had been paid. (We could have said the end was midnight on the day itself but then paying for it all would be a separate project)

I suggested that as well as deciding what he was going to do, he should make it clear what he was not going to do. For example, the Groom's family had agreed to provide all of the flowers, the hire of all outfits and to arrange all of the transport. It was important, therefore, that my friend made it clear that he was not going to include these items in his budgeting or planning.

A week later the two sets of parents, the happy couple and I all sat down to dinner to discuss the arrangements. Not only did we discuss what we were going to do we also talked through what we were not doing and we discovered something fairly fundamental. None of us were going to organise a cake. This oversight could easily had been missed if we hadn't discussed what we thought to be "out of scope" for each of us.

By defining what is out of scope as well as what is in, and by clearly communicating this to all those involved, the chances of last minute panics or additions to the project are substantially reduced. This means a subsequent increase in the likelihood of the project coming in on time and in budget.

Your call to action this week is:

• Read the scoping statements of 5 of the biggest projects you are currently responsible for. (If you haven't got any you could be heading for trouble!)
• Have your project managers communicated what is in and, just as importantly, what is outside their project scope?
• If they haven't, what controls do you have in place that will ensure that no-one forgets to order the cake?