MONITORING AND CONTROL STAGE (SCOPE) : CONTROL SCOPE

Control scope is the process of monitoring the status of the product and project scope, and managing changes in order to maintain the scope baseline throughout the project. Remember that control scope process helps to avoid scope creep.

This process can use the following inputs:

• Project management plan that describes how to monitor and control the project scope, how to compare the actual results with the scope baseline to determine the change and how to manage the change on the project if occurs.
• Requirements documentation that lists all the requirements needed for the product and the project along with their acceptance criteria. This helps to detect any deviation in the scope agreed for the project or product to the stakeholders.
• Requirements traceability matrix that helps to detect the impact of any change in the scope.
• Work performance data that provides the number of change requests received, number of change requests accepted or number of deliverables completed etc
• Organizational Process assets such as monitoring and reporting methods and templates to use for control scope process, the existing scope, procedures, guidelines, policies regarding the same

The process can only be done by Variance analysis, that determines the cause and degree of differences between the scope baseline and actual results and decides whether the corrective or preventive action is required.

The outputs are

• Work performance information that provides information for making the decision regarding scope including categories of changes, the identified scope variances and their causes, their impact towards schedule or cost, and forecast of the future scope performance,
• Change requests for corrective, preventive action or defect repair after being analysed the scope performance and
• Updates in 
• Project management plan if the approved change requests have an effect on the project scope, cost and schedule 
• Project documents such as requirements documentation and requirements traceability matrix and 
• Organizational process assets like causes of variances, preventive and corrective actions taken and lessons learnt from this process.

Note that failure to control scope will cause the project to get behind the schedule and to over-run its budget.

References:

PMI (2013). A Guide to the Project Management Book of Knowledge (PMBOK Guide 5^th Ed.) USA, Project Management Institute

https://www.pm-primer.com/control-scope/