Scoping Exercise for guaranteed Big Data project success!
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Big projects with great teams fail. Yes, you read it correctly. Projects with proper funding clubbed together with great minds fail at astonishing rates. Be it product development, roll-outs & upgrades, system maintenance all these projects consume tremendous efforts and resources over a certain period of time. The case is not different in case of big data transformations.
According to a report, 14% of IT projects fail. If we look at the projects which don’t fail completely, 31% are ones which didn’t even meet their goal, 43% exceeded their budget and resources whereas 49% were delayed.
Looking at the staggering numbers above, you can clearly understand there are practices and activities which are being neglected or not done correctly. These numbers don’t just talk about failure, they also talk about financial losses and demoralization of the employee working on the project.
Simply put, poor planning is the number one mistake which results in the failure of the project. Poor planning can result in bad time management, inaccurate requirements understanding, inability to understand the risks and challenges associated currently, project objectives definition and finally dissatisfied customers.
Incorporating the scoping exercise in your initial project planning not only increases the chances of project success but can also provide with the solid grounding and requirement analysis it needs from the start.
Importance of Scoping Exercise for Big Data Transformation Projects
A Scoping Exercise exactly helps project teams understand the specific areas of value additions before developing a formal project plan.
A well structured Scoping exercise provides a complete understanding of the existing systems and challenges, sheds light on the intricacies involved in implementing the systems required for the project and defines all the work needed to successfully meet the project objectives. In simple words, if you want a clear picture of all the work that needs to happen on the project, understand the project scope and know the ins & outs of the existing systems, a scoping exercise is the best option. For businesses undergoing big data transformations, understanding customer’s business requirements, data pipeline, current technology stack, and resource allocation, are some of the areas that a scoping exercise aims to fathom.
Using scoping exercise initially in the project planning phase can provide significant advancement and advantages over the traditional methods. The biggest advantage is, as the expert defining the scope has implemented the solution before or has an in-depth understanding of the problem and the industry he is aware of all pitfalls or problems that a project can face.
Not only it can provide insights on the resource allocation, distribution and goal setting without any confusion, it can also assess the cost impact of a project allowing to understand the accurate costs for the solution implementation and describe the major objectives.
Early involvement in the project can not only provide a more effective and tailored plan which is easy to build, but it also helps to propose a phasing and implementation plan which can enable the client to receive quick ROI coupled with an accurate timeline. Scoping exercise ensures there is no failure in terms of functionality, cost or timeline. By doing this early analysis, different phases can be planned, plans can be incorporated into the contract and risk of issues or extra cost which can happen later can be significantly reduced.
The scoping exercise will help you to reduce the risk in your IT projects, improved success rate, ROI and team morale making the hard work and all the planning worthwhile in the end.
Introduce Scoping exercise in your early planning and set your project up to success.
About the Author
Raghavendra is the Assistant Marketing Manager at Sigmoid. He specializes in content marketing domains, digital and social media marketing.
