Most project managers, sponsors, and team members suffer from a very human fault -- the inability to express what they want to do and what they need. Even worse, most people lack the ability to understand what others want and need. If we could overcome these disabilities completely, imagine how many project disappointments we would avoid.

In this one-hour web seminar, we will talk about this fundamentally difficult problem: how to set and communicate project scope. There is no way to express and understand scope completely clearly, but there are tools we can use to help.

This session will discuss which tools work and which fail under specific situations. Most experts recommend "cure all" basic tools like charters, brainstorming meetings, work breakdown structures, and documentation, but they do not work for all teams. You will get to hear about my experiences and research in the one-hour web seminar, and you get the chance to ask your questions and learn from each other's experiences in the on-line discussion area.

Examples in this session will come from construction, engineering, sales, marketing, and software development. Projects from every industry face these basic problems. We will talk about the differences between software "requirements gathering", understanding owner needs, and other industry-specific issues.

Learning Objectives

• Understand that project scope will always be imperfectly understood by all your stakeholders

• Understand some of the best techniques available to reduce scope misunderstandings

• Be able to assess which techniques are most likely to succeed in different situations, for different stakeholders, and for different types of projects

• Be able to list at least one new technique, borrowed from a different industry, to communicate project or product scope

• Teacher: Alex Brown, PMP IPMA-C