SCOPE MANAGEMENT;WHAT DO YOU REALLY WANT IN YOUR LIFE?

I won't forget the incident easily. It was a few years ago. I really didn't know anything about scope management at the time. It would be several years in the future as a management consultant that I would look back and crystallize the concept in clear management terminology.

However, I will continue to remember the lessons vividly for the rest of my earthly existence. It was 5:00am in the morning, when my number one mentor in the school of success woke me up to teach me life principles for success. He looked at me straight in the eye and said what do you really want? Before I could respond, my father elaborated further: Your answer to this question will remain the strongest determining force in your desire for success he bellowed! What do you really want in your life? What are the most important things to you? What genuinely resonates with personally?
“If you do not answer this question adequately and appropriately; you won't be able to get anywhere with anything.”

This was scope management made easy. He proceeded to say write it down! Unknown to me at that time, he was already teaching me two of the core processes of scope management technically called Requirements gathering and define scope.

As I consider this great lesson from my father's house, it is pertinent for us to take note that great question “what" and then write it down.
This is applicable and instructive not only in our personal lives but also in our businesses and corporate national life. All successful ventures of the past had to identify their stakeholders and ask the big "what" question.

They also had to distill and crystallize it in clear understandable language. Until this is done, enterprise success will remain a delusive mirage of grandiose illusions. As my father said, the problem with undefined destinations is that you won't know when you get there. Neither would you be able to calibrate nor measure it. There also will be no alignment of thought and action and the resultant effect will be the proverbial tower of Babel. At the end of the day, what will happen is wanton waste of energies with no synergy and synchronization.

In the study of Nations, Nigeria is a case on point.

It is a nation of about 15O million people of over 250 ethnicities. In its 50 years existence, there has been no organized collection of requirements. No one documented any "what”, probably because there is none. Hope or the expectations of a positive destination has been identified as the great preservative of corporate human existence! When there are no clear destinations, people despair! What you see is anarchy, riots and killings, ethnic violence etc, because there are no unified centralized scope management infrastructures.

The sheer size and magnitude of all forms of resources available to Nigeria is laying waste, because there is no central alignment. All stakeholders pursue their different agenda, hence sectarianism rules supreme and prodigal expenditure of national creative energies continue.

The key to national economic revival is to identify stakeholders, collect requirements and crystallize a defined national scope. My grandfather once told me that there is no correlation between the actual size of the head and the size of the ache in the head. Our successes are not by the size of our abilities, talents or "creativities"; but by the internal "systematic" of the frameworks that we give those innate "giftings" so that they can have profitable expression. Proper stakeholder identification, with requirements gathering and integrated documentation of same is the hope of superior productivity in every facets of our personal, corporate and national life. Embrace scope management today.