SCOPE, COST, TIME, RISKS

These days I have been involved in a tender for construction of 20,000 m2 office building. My team hold several meetings with the prospective contractors and we tried hard to make clear that the scope, cost, time and risks are well defined by the contractors. Today I came across an article by Jason Westland which although is for client-project manager "scope, cost, time, risk" meeting I think is suitable for the client-contractor meeting:

Define the |Work Techniques

Establish the Triple Constraint when the Project Charter is Approved

At the end of the Definition and Planning process you should have an agreement with your sponsor on the work that will be completed and the cost (time) and duration that are needed to complete the work. These three items form a concept called the “triple constraint”. The key aspect of the triple constraint is that if one of the three items change, at least one, if not both, of the other items need to change as well. (The triple constraint is actually written a couple similar ways. The cost item can also be referred to as effort, which makes more sense if the labor costs are all internal and if there are no non-labor costs. Sometimes, the scope item is referred to as quality, which then focuses on delivering a certain quality level for a certain cost and duration. This is a more narrow aspect of the triple constraint, but the general concepts still hold true.)

Try to Understand Your Client’s Expressed Needs and Their Real Needs

The Project Charter describes the project at a high level. The Project Charter specifically describes the needs of the client, as well as the project team’s estimate of the effort, duration and cost to fulfill those needs. The details of the client’s need are then defined in more detail through the gathering of business requirements.

It is important for the project manager and project team to understand that the true needs of the client may or may not be the same as the needs that are expressed to you and that are the foundation of the Project Charter and the business requirements. In many cases, the client does not understand his true needs when the project starts. The true needs can sometimes evolve over the course of the project. Likewise, the client may have a clear vision of his needs, but he may have a hard time expressing the needs to the project team. To a certain extent, this is the purpose of scope change management – to allow the client to change the requirements of the project while it is in-progress.

The project team can document the expressed needs of the client and use the expressed needs as the basis for the approval of the Project Charter and the Business Requirements. However, the project team should do as good a job as possible uncovering the true needs of the client. This involves techniques such as asking good questions, asking targeted follow-up questions, gathering input from all key stakeholders, asking more questions when requirements don’t seem to make sense, etc. Obviously, the project team should do whatever it can to try to uncover the true needs of the client. The closer the true needs of the client are to his expressed needs, the closer you will be to getting the project right the first time.