Scope of the project - Its importance and relation to lessons from Battleship game

Understanding 4 main control factors in project management are of vital importance. This is the lesson I learned when doing the term paper.

When we decided to focus only on the “Recipe” function of the Tesco Mobile App, sometimes we were confused: Is it too little to show off? However, after considering the scope of this exercise, and mostly, after evaluation of pros and cons of doing other improvements, we were totally confident to conclude that: Implementing other functions such as (in-house map and direction, voice recognition etc.) are over-scoped. We strongly feel that connecting “Recipe” tab to online shopping function is vital, as confirmed by users in our survey and narration session. 

This intuition is confirmed by lessons from Battleship game. The lecturer says about reduce the workload in one iteration, but I mainly focus on his proposition about when to stop the game. If you hit some ships, and you feel that the other ships are somewhere else, and you don’t know if it’s worthy to continue spending your resource, it’s time to end the game and win. The connection between “Recipe” function and shopping function is the missing piece of the ship that we must hit before the whole effort is counted, and now we hit it, we already got the reward; there is not point to wander around. 

As understanding the scope of the project your are doing is important, it’s worthy to reflex on factors of the project view.

The project view depicted by the following figure tells us about 4 main things to mange in a project: scope, quality, cost and time. Although the four factors are interrelated, scope is directly linked with cost while quality is directly linked to time (The two pairs are in opposite side of the graph). 

Even successful project can only achieve high level of 3 of the 4 factors. For example, you can only have a project with good quality, big scope and relatively low cost, but not little time. In fact, if you try to extend the scope, the cost will also increase and if you choose to ensure the quality in every steps of the project (getting requirement, designing, coding follows high standards ect.), the time consumed will increase accordingly.

My understanding is that scope is the most important factor: Given you be able to manage scope of project, you can subjectively control the other three factors.