Don't kick off your project until everyone is aligned on the basics! Here's how to write a scope of work that sets reasonable expectations from the beginning.
A lot of moving parts go into setting a project up for success.
From the start, you want to level-set and get everyone on the same page. This means managing client expectations and aligning your team on what’s required of them.
One way to do this is by creating a scope of work document, giving everyone a clear baseline that they can refer back to. Get this right, and it’ll help you prevent scope creep and avoid disagreements about deliverables later down the line.
So, how do you create a comprehensive but concise and useful scope of work?
This guide explains how you can achieve the right balance while answering what’s included in a scope of work, when you should be making it - and common, easy-to-make mistakes to avoid.
Here’s everything we’ll cover:
Ready? Let’s do it!
A scope of work is a blueprint giving a high-level overview of key aspects of a project including its deliverables, budget and timeline overview, and the people who would be working on it.
It’s a vital part of effective project management, covering the following:
This is a key point to remember: you don’t want your scope of work to be too detail-oriented, but you also don’t want it to be too broad that it ends up offering little to no value for the involved parties. Strive for balance.
Since this one or two page, initial project documentation, essentially summarizes everything about a project, it gets stakeholders and team members aligned on their understanding on the fundamental basics of the project.
In doing so, it helps you meet client expectations while keeping the project within its defined scope.
Here’s a detailed look at the reasons why the scope of work is such an important document:
By answering questions like what’s included in the project, what’s not, and by when and how you’d be progressing, a project scope gives you a clear action plan.
Think of it as your project guardrail. Without scope of work, you can easily lose sight of the path — subsequently veering away from the finish line, even taking under-optimized, resource-wasting routes to it.
With all essential work, budget, and timeline-related details in your project scope, it helps to set (and, eventually, achieve) client expectations.
By sharing the scope document with your team members, you can also align them around the expected work, readying them for what’s to come.
With stakeholders and team members on the same wavelength, a project scope also helps you stick with the determined action plan within the scope set for it — maximizing project profitability.
With a scope of work offering clarity and alignment, it minimizes the chance of stakeholders ending up unsatisfied.
Further, by ensuring that you stick with the planned project timeline and dedicated budget, it helps reduce associated project risks on that front.
Yet another reason why a scope of work is important: everyone knows what’s expected of them. This includes stakeholders who learn deliverables included in the defined budget by a specific timeline and internal project team members.
In turn, this leads to smoother project progress, and subsequently, completion.
Given a work scope packs in all essential detail related to deliverables, timelines, and resources, it serves as a bible that everyone can refer to in times of lack of clarity.
By showcasing what’s included in the project, at all times, a project scope helps tackle misunderstandings, contributing to project success and satisfaction on all fronts (employees and clients).
Learn more: What is Scope Creep? ➡️
Create a scope of work before your project starts, around the time you sign your project contract.
The exact time you choose to include creating a project scope in your workflow is unique to your business, of course.
If you’re a small team, for example, you could work on the scope of work document alongside client negotiations so it’s ready for reviewing and signing at the time when the contract is signed.
One thing to keep in mind here: creating a project scope takes time — it’s not a typical 20-minute task on your to-do list. It’s why finding an ideal time to create a project scope is essential for improving your operational performance.
A scope of work and a statement of work are two different things; where the scope of work is part of the statement of work, not vice versa.
To fully understand the difference though, you’ll want to dig into what each means:
A statement of work is a formal document outlining the full project details including everything in the scope of work as well as payment terms and performance criteria. Think of it as the readable version of your scope of work that you share with your client before any work begins at all.
The scope of work, on the other hand, is a detailed breakdown of the project deliverables, milestones, timelines, budget, and potential risks. It’s shared with the client alongside the statement of work.
To write a scope of work that sets the project up for success, take the following steps:
The very first step to creating an effective scope of work is meeting your primary stakeholders (for, example, your client or project sponsor) to ask them to describe what project success looks like to them.
Get them to paint a clear picture of their desired result before you can start planning out details.
You might be tempted to omit this step. But an ‘effective’ project scope that drives results and maximizes the chances of keeping everyone aligned is one that first captures these results well, establishing a realistic and achievable vision of success.
Next, document your understanding of the client’s objectives in clear, simple terms.
If possible, run the summary by them to confirm you’ve captured project expectations correctly. Once approved, this expectation becomes your project’s north star that helps prevent scope creep later.
Once done, it’s time to get more detailed.
Now lay out all the deliverables to achieve the project objective.
Then, look into specific tasks you’ll need to complete to meet each deliverable.
With your list of deliverables, divided by tasks under it ready, start grouping deliverables by phases. For instance, deliverables X and Y (or tasks, if you want to be granular) to be worked on in phase 1 of the project.
It’s entirely up to you on how detailed you want to get here.
Generally, it helps to determine project deliverables, individual tasks, and phases. But you can also go into details about tasks to better determine the time it’d take to complete them, which brings us to our next point.
You could use your experience and intuition to allot each project phase a duration and prepare an overall project completion timeline.
But the best approach involves reviewing project tasks and incorporating past data, also, to determine what time it typically takes to complete the exact or similar task.
This way, you’ll have a task list with turnaround time ready. You can then sum it up to create a schedule for different phases, marked by specific project milestones.
Working your way from the bottom to set timelines this way gives you a better idea of how long the project will take. It also uses data from your past projects to make a realistic timeline.
Now review the skills and expertise you’d need to complete the project.
Check for any client requests too. For example, are there any specific folks they’ve requested to work with (this is particularly true for returning clients)?
When done, look for available folks with the skill set you need. The key to unlocking project success here: match resource skills and experience, not just availability.
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This step requires you walk an extra mile by noting down any potential project risks.
To this end, review resource risks, financial risks, market risk, and performance risks among other common types of project risks.
Also important here is to create or adjust a ready stakeholder management plan. This involves creating a quick plan identifying the most important stakeholders and how you plan to engage them. This guide helps you create a stakeholder management plan.
But remember, your stakeholder management checklist is strictly for internal use. So it’s entirely up to whether you want to create it as part of the scope of work or separately.
Last but not the least, finalize your scope of work and share it with team members and stakeholders.
Request client(s) to make any suggestions for adjustments as they review the scope document to keep disagreements, conflicts, and misunderstandings at bay as the project starts.
Before we wrap this up, a short rundown of mistakes to avoid that are easy to make when you plan your project scope of work:
With all that goes into a work of scope document, it’s easy for it to turn into a messy document with way too many details.
It’s why we highly recommend prioritizing readability and usability. Ask yourself: in what ways can we make the project scope more accessible to team members. What can we do to make it more easy to read?
Some suggestions: add a table of contents and use more bullet points featuring only essential information.
Another tip is to use an adjustable timeline that shows you how the project timeline sits with the timeline of projects already in your pipeline (this helps prevent timeline clashes too).
Also consider mapping out your scope in a single source of truth — a platform where you manage your projects and collaborate with your team so the scope document is easily accessible to everyone.
Pro tip: Revisit your scopes every six months to objectively evaluate them against completed projects. Are there areas where you could’ve been more realistic? How many of these projects outgrew the original scope you made — what are related changes that you could make to your scope planning process?
You don’t work on one project at a time so review what’s already in the pipeline, run your drafted timelines and resource requirements by prevailing project timelines and resource availability.
If you manage your projects and resources in Runn, for instance, you can do this easily by reviewing how a new project’s proposed timeline would impact ongoing project timelines.
You can also tap into a skill inventory to review not only available resources for the new project but also filter them based on their skills, day rate, and seniority level (experience).
This way, you avoid resource clashes, onboard a project team with the most relevant experience, and also bring on people that fall within the dedicated project budget.
Altogether, planning the work scope for a new project in tandem with projects in your timeline ensures your plan is realistic, therefore, making it easy to stick with it — requiring fewer project changes or adjustments down the line.
Most scope plans focus too much on what’s included. What’s important though is a reminder checklist noting what’s not included in the scope.
Such a checklist makes it easy for the project team to not go over the board with additional deliverables not included in the scope. It also sets boundaries with stakeholders while keeping you on track with the project budget and timeline.
Because here’s the thing: the more familiar your team is with the scope, the better they can stay within project boundaries.
A big benefit of project scope is setting client expectations. But you can’t do that if you don’t share it with your stakeholders.
It’s also sharing it with them before the project kick-off that ensures any needed adjustments are made in the start.
So make sure you create a client-shareable version of your project scope document to pass it on to the primary stakeholder(s).
And finally, project scopes are supposed to be high-level. You can get granular once the project contract is signed, going into more detail with a work breakdown structure.
This saves you from overspending time on creating a scope that might not get a green light or may need to be redone in case the big picture shifts after reviewing the initial project scope.
You can always map out project scope details in a Word document. Some organizations even make plan work of scope in spreadsheets.
The most time saving and efficient way here, though, is planning the scope in your project management tool.
Not only does it make the scope more accessible to internal stakeholders and team members but also gives you:
