Do You See What I See?

When we look out on the world, around nine-tenths of so-called reality can be accounted for by the mechanism of perception, a complex process of data gathering and modeling that translates the stimuli of external phenomena into internal mental constructs that we process and manipulate--and then re-apply to the external world via the agency of our actions. Two hundred thousand years of evolutionary biology has hardwired homo sapiens to interact with the world in this way. Thus, what we perceive as reality is as much about what’s inside our heads as it is about what’s out there. Which may be one reason why scope management can sometimes be a vexing experience for project managers.

Whatever the project, scope always conjures to my mind some sense of physical presence, even when the project’s artifacts are embodied in the intangibilities of software. Scope presents itself to me as a bounded set of things, to be captured and contained within the project’s net. Its objects comprise things both tangible and intangible that can be analyzed, counted and categorized.

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- Margaret Thatcher