So, in the last video, we saw the time cost quality triangle at a race the question of what happens if shift happens, and you go to your boss, to your client, to your director, and you say, hey, something's gone wrong. Could I have more budget? And they say, No, you can't. So you say, Okay, fair enough. Can I have more time? No, you can't have that.

Okay, so we're gonna have to cut corners. And that's when your boss turns to you and says, No, you can't cut corners, either. Now, most project managers fully understand the time cost quality triangle, but what very few of them will do tell you is that they've got something up their sleeve, because there is a fourth corner to the time cost quality triangle. It isn't an objective in truth, but it behaves very much like an objective. The fourth corner to the time cost quality triangle is scope. And scope is not about what you're going to deliver.

It's not about the quality. It's about the breadth and the depth of your ambitions. Scope tells you how much you're going to achieve. And if you can't cut corners, if you can't have more time, and if you can't have more budget, then you have to trim your ambitions less broad or less deep. And if we think about the Apollo moon mission, clearly the big cost is getting to the moon, not what you do on the moon. Therefore, it was inappropriate for NASA to trim The depth of their ambition.

But the original 10 lunar landing moonshot plan that would have started with the landing, the first landing of Apollo 11 and ended of Apollo 20 was trimmed in breath. So that Apollo 17 was the last landing. It was the scope. So let's have a look at scope. Now, scope is probably the easiest picture to draw in all project management. Here it is.

Everything inside this circle is in scope. This means it is your job as a project manager to deliver it. In the UK, we most often talk about scope of work. And so we describe what is in scope is the work that the project team needs to do. In the US, project managers more often talk about scope as the products that you need to deliver. It's the things Now, of course, work leads to things.

And the two descriptions are wholly equivalent. But what you mustn't do is mix the two up. Because clearly not there is a one to one relationship, they do one piece of work, you get one output. Often you have to do a series of activities to get one output. And sometimes you do a series of activities and that yield multiple deliverables. So if you confuse the two descriptions of scope, within one project, then you're asking for trouble.

Everything outside of the circle, that's out of scope, it is not your responsibility. Sometimes these items are known as exclusions from scope. They're not your responsibility, they may not be happening there may not be sufficient resources to pay for them. The business case may be too weak, they may not be important enough. On the other hand, they may be happening but some One Else or some other project or some other route of delivery is going to ensure that they happen. And as a project manager, whilst there may be some liaison coordination to do, they are not your direct responsibility.

So that's scope. Why is it really important? It's really important, because there are three words that project managers have come to fear above all else in life. Because the thing about projects is they smell. They smell sweet. They smell resources and creativity and innovation and teamwork, budgets.

This amount of excitement and people will come up to you when you've got a project and they'll go Hmm, congratulations, Mike. You've got a project while you're doing a project, like, hey, they can't hit him those three words while you're doing the project. Could you just could you Just other three words that signify someone wants to get their agenda into your scope. But then they come in with extra cash, they come in with extra resources, are they giving you extra time to do it? No. Could you just is their attempt to get you to do work with your resources admits their agenda, and therefore compromises your ability to deliver the scope that you have undertaken to deliver and negotiating scope and matching scopes of resources is for me, the single hardest part of project management so it matters.

This could you just effect is technically known as scope creep, sometimes called Project creep, and military, it's usually called mission creep. It is an attempt to expand the boundaries of scope. What you need to do is to stop it and in the next video, I'll explain how