Computational Intelligence for Project Scope

 Managing scope is a critical process in information technology (IT) project management. Reporting the status of scope requires both an understanding of the status of individual activities and the aggregation into an overall status for the project. Unlike cost and schedule which have the objective measures of currency spent or days passed, scope is subjective. Understanding the status of scope as a project moves forward is critical to success; however, many times IT projects fail due to mismanagement of scope constraints. Recent research has confirmed status reporting and analysis as a major problem in IT projects. Other research has looked at how computational intelligence (CI) techniques might be applied to the domain of project management for cost and time constraints. This study looks at scope, a third constraint of project management. Since scope has properties of imprecision and vagueness, fuzzy logic would be an appropriate tool from Computational Intelligence. This study focuses on using the recently proposed Z-mouse for the collection of status information, and then using fuzzy logic for the reporting of project status for the scope constraint.