Samenvatting

The case study assesses the question ‘how can Scope best utilise the critical success factors of Scope One to gain market share?’, by focusing on identifying and analysing the critical success factors of Scope One. A framework was devised from four project management theories and two agile software development theories to present 11 potential success factors for Scope One: Defined Direction, Schedule, Organisation and Support, Personnel, Management Approach, Communication, Client Consideration, Risk Awareness and Avoidance, Technical, Delivery, and Performance Measurement.

Seven questions consider the criticality of each factors based around the six theories in the framework, along with two other theories, a Scope One user survey and two separate interviews with the project manager and also a business analyst involved with Scope One. The one major limitation of the study is the limited access to the market and external users of Scope One, partially due to the data privacy restrictions of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

As a result of the study, Client Consideration is found to be the most critical success factor, appearing as critical in response to six of the seven questions, followed by Defined Direction and Schedule.

The paper identifies three recommendations for the Scope One project, which addresses the limited external client and user involvement in the study. The first suggestion entails gaining greater insight into external user perceptions of project success in order to understand what clients consider as success factors and how the Scope One project can cater these success perceptions. Secondly, gaining feedback from both internal and external users will continually provide the organisation with relevant feedback. This can be achieved by creating very short and periodic user satisfaction surveys; another idea is to highlight new features to users upon signing in and request feedback on it with a simple thumbs up/thumbs down option. This would ideally increase the amount of users providing feedback by generating quick and easy mechanisms to do so.

Finally, the criticisms from potential clients that decline the service provide interesting intelligence on the market’s perception of the service and whether the company can facilitate individual needs. Moreover, by identifying the individual needs of potential clients and translating and integrating that into the Scope One service can contribute towards a competitive advantage. The information received can aid with task prioritisation, altering the scope, maintaining quality, measuring performance and assessing risk. Expanding the detail and amount of responses received will offer new ideas and alternatives to consistently improve the service. Most importantly, it will assure that the client’s expectations, requirements and opinions are kept at the forefront of the strategy and direction of the project.

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joe-mackenzie-996436b3/