With the Standish group’s CHAOS report (Standish, 1995) proclaiming ICT project success on a mere one-third of projects, project managers have an obligation worldwide to gain control of the situation. Through concrete scope management processes, ICT project managers can learn and embrace proven approaches that measure the size of software projects, streamline the requirements articulation and management, and impose solid change management controls, to keep projects on time and on budget. Scope management is not rocket science, however, with 2/3 of the world’s ICT projects deemed as failures, it is apparent that managing scope is not a natural byproduct of project management. Learn approaches and tips used in Europe, Australia, and North America that have dramatically increased the success on ICT projects by trained scope managers.

Introduction to project management issues unique to ICT projects

Every month newspapers announce in every country where Information and Communications Technology (ICT) projects are developed, failures of astronomical proportions. Failures, late deliveries and cost overruns plague our industry and project managers worldwide struggle to stay afloat and manage their projects using the latest tools and techniques intended to create project success. Questions of how to improve the state of affairs in an industry of advanced technology, bright project managers, leading edge maturity models led two particular countries, Australia and Finland, to investigate further – with results worth paying attention to.

Quoting the first president of the not-for-profit International Software Benchmarking Standards Group (ISBSG) Terry Wright in 2000: “In an industry worth an estimated $200bn (US) per year (with Australian share at $4.6bn), why should this be the case? There are probably two primary reasons. Firstly, the software industry is relatively young and is still in the evolutionary stage. Unlike most other engineering disciplines we have not had access to ancient and excellent tools which allow us to predict, plan and measure progress and productivity.” Wright goes on to say “Secondly, until relatively recently we have had no reliable and broadly accepted technique for measuring the output of a software engineering project. In the building industry they talk squares of floor space and in road construction kilometers of highway – but we have had nothing.” (Wright, 2000, p. 1 ) This led Wright and the Victorian Government to establish Southern SCOPE, an initiative whereby ICT projects are initialized, scoped, split into manageable sub-projects (as necessary), quantified, costed (on the basis of currency per unit size), managed, and delivered using a new concept that directly addresses “Scope Management”. The results of the Australian Southern SCOPE and the subsequent Northern SCOPE initiative by the Finnish Software Measurement Association (FiSMA) are profound: their success rates on ICT projects have skyrocketed, and their cost overruns plummeted to levels unprecedented in the ICT industry. This paper outlines the core concepts of both the Southern and Northern SCOPE initiatives and presents solid recommendations for Project Managers of ICT projects to dramatically increase both the customer satisfaction and the success of their project delivery.