Microsoft® Office Project 2007 All-in-One Desk Reference For Dummies®

Chapter 4. Putting Final Changes into Place

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✓	Redefining the scope of your project
✓	Breaking off a piece of your project
✓	Selling changes to shareholders
✓	Cutting corners: Quality versus cost

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In the preceding chapters in this minibook, we explore specific changes you can make to your tasks and resources to fine-tune your Project plan.

In this chapter, we tackle the sometimes-painful, big-picture changes that are occasionally necessary to get to a plan you and your management can live with.

We explore some more comprehensive changes to the scope, timing, and quality of your project, and then we tell you how to pitch your final project and any changes to it to your management.

Getting to a Final Project Plan

Say that you’ve done everything you can to tweak the timing and costs on your project, and you still end up with a finish date that’s one month too late, and you’re $10,000 over budget. What can you do on a strategic level to get to a final project plan that you can get buy off on and begin to implement?

You can try several tactics, including redefining your project scope, splitting off a piece of the work to become a different project, and cutting some serious corners on quality of your deliverables.

Redefining the scope of your project

When you’ve pushed and pulled and tried every single thing you can think of to get your project plan to work, it might be time to revisit the project scope. In essence, you’re analyzing whether you bit off ...