Estimate the Scope of the Project

Establish a top-level work breakdown structure (WBS) to estimate the scope of the project.

The WBS evolves with the project. Typically, the WBS is a product oriented structure that provides a scheme for identifying and organizing the logical units of work to be managed, which are called “work packages”. The WBS provides a reference and organizational mechanism for assigning effort, schedule, and responsibility and is used as the underlying framework to plan, organize, and control the work done on the project.
Typical Work Products in this step are:

• Task descriptions
• Work package descriptions
• WBS

To develop a high-level WBS, project team can base on practices below:

1. Identify the product architecture.

• Identified risks and their mitigation tasks
• Tasks for deliverables and supporting activities (supporting activities can be review activities, co-operate with other group in company)
• Tasks for skill and knowledge acquisition (this can be training activities)
• Tasks for development of needed support plans, such as configuration management, quality assurance, and verification plansTasks for integration and management of non-developmental items (such as making project plan, monitoring project progress, controlling project issues etc)

2. Identify the work packages in sufficient detail to specify estimates of project tasks, responsibilities, and schedule. The top-level WBS is intended to help in gauging the project work effort in terms of tasks and organizational roles and responsibilities. The amount of detail in the WBS at this more detailed level helps in developing realistic schedules, thereby minimizing the need for management reserve.

3. Identify product or product components that will be externally acquired.

4. Identify work products that will be reused.

Example work product in this step:

Establish Estimates

The first step in implementing project planning is establish and maintain project planning parameters.

Project planning parameters include all information needed by the project to perform the necessary planning, organizing, staffing, directing, coordinating, reporting, and budgeting. Estimates of planning parameters should have a sound basis to instill confidence that any plans based on these estimates are capable of supporting project objectives.

Factors that are typically considered when estimating these parameters include the following:

• Project requirements, including the product requirements (functional and non-functional requirements), the requirements imposed by the organization, the requirements imposed by the customer, and other requirements that impact the project
• Scope of the project (What project will do ?)
• Identified tasks and work products
• Technical approach
• Selected project life-cycle model (e.g., waterfall, incremental, spiral, or prototyping etc)
• Attributes of the work products and tasks (e.g., size, complexity, or difficulty)
• Schedule
• Models or historical data for converting the attributes of the work products and tasks into labour hours and cost
• Methodology (e.g., models, data, algorithms) used to determine needed material, skills, labour hours, and cost

Documentation of the estimating rationale and supporting data is needed for stakeholders’ review and commitment to the plan and for maintenance of the plan during project development time.