A beginners guide to web design: Managing the scope of a new web project

Requirement analysis can be a very difficult task because identifying all the requirements of a new project does not happen all in one go. At times, a prototype is developed to identify other requirements needed for the project to become successful.

Understanding the requirements is really essential because it becomes the foundation for other activities in the life cycle of the project. If the requirements of a particular software project are not well understood it can lead to scope creep which occurs when new functionality is added to the new system and this can lead to additional development cost.

For this reason, when the scope of the project has been defined and frozen, only top priority requirements that are closely related to the scope of the project should be added to the backlog of the project plan.

To prevent issues as such as scope creep, development teams should carefully prepare meetings with stakeholders and users of the system in order to clarify the project requirements at the beginning of the project. It is possible that all requirements will not be included at the beginning of the project and for this reason an agile methodology would satisfy the opportunity for adding any missing requirements later down the line. However, According to D. Tegarden, A. Dennis, and B. Haley Wixom clarifying the business need and high-level requirements of a project can reduce scope creep to less than 5 percent through meetings and prototyping.

At Niniwebsites we have encountered this situation where our clients have fully used their number of revisions even though there might be some requirements missing that could be of potential benefit to the business. In this scenario, the missing requirements are recorded as future enhancements to the current project. In this way, we avoid increasing the cost of developing the project and preventing scope creep at the same time.

Avoiding scope creep can be beneficial is many ways both to the client and to the development team. It reduces the time taken to roll out new features and avoids project failure by focusing on the essential task needed to deliver the project at hand.