What is project scope? How does this differ from the milestones?

The Question:

I am fairly new to project management & Apptivo, and I’m a bit confused about project scope. From my understanding, a milestone sets the Project goals and limits of what occurs in the project, why is scope needed?

The Answer:

Project scope is actually what should determine the goals and limits of your project.  A Project Milestone is a significant point of progress towards fulfilling your project scope.When a project is first initiated, it will start originate either from a customer problem or from a high-level business requirement that must be fulfilled.  Before deciding how or when you accomplish project tasks, you first must decide what will be achieved at the end of the project.

Project scope planning in Apptivo is handled in two ways, through requirements, and cases.  If a project is initiated to address a problem reported by a customer, then you would link the support case(s) from the customer into the project.  This allows you to review your milestones & activities at any time, and determine whether they are working towards solving the original problem this project was initiated for.

If the project is initiated for something like the sale of a product, or optimizing internal processes, then you’ll want to lay down the requirements of what needs to occur.  You can create an individual requirement for each high-level business objective that must be achieved.

It’s very important to remember that project scope should be 100% separate from project execution.  Before deciding “how” to tackle a project, you must always first define “what” you are going to take on.

Hence creating scopes, set milestones and tasks becomes the Project planning tools. Creation of Sub Projects, Milestones, Tasks and subtasks and completing it successfully helps in accomplishing the Project Management goals and objectives.

Back to Getting Started page