FIGURE OUT THE SCOPE

After you have been issued the charter and therefore authorized to begin work, you need to begin determining the scope. The scope defines what you are actually doing and in some cases what you are not doing. The goal is to develop a set of deliverables called work packages that represent the entire project. The sum of all of the deliverables should equal the totality of your project so that 100 percent of the work packages equals 100 percent of the project. In order to create these work packages, you need to know what the requirements are so that you can tie each work
package to a requirement.

You begin with developing and understanding the requirements. Using the list of stakeholders that you developed
earlier, you will begin to interview those stakeholders so you can create and organize the requirements. An example of a requirement may be that the event site for the conference must hold at least 60 people and have easy access to hotel rooms for those who have to fly in and stay overnight. Then, you want to start decomposing your project into work packages. Decomposition is a powerful technique that enables you to take a complicated project and break it down into smaller, more manageable pieces. For illustrative purposes, below is an example of a work breakdown structure (WBS) for the conference that you have been placed in charge of. You can either present the WBS as a graphical representation or in an outline form. Remember that a work package is not a list of activities but rather the lowest
level of detail that represents a deliverable. In some cases, the work package may become a project for the owner of the work package.