Scope Management Approaches for Thai Governmental Projects Under Dynamic Environment: Case Study Project License Plate Recognition System for Security in 3 Thai Southern Most Provinces

Abstract

Governmental project management is normally not as flexible as managing private sector projects. There are many rules and restrictions, which make the changes of budget, schedules and more importantly scopes very complicated and difficult compared to changes in non-governmental projects. The changing process is complicate and time-consuming. This can result in an unsuccessful project. In this paper, the project and the Thai Defense Technology Institute (DTI) will be introduced. The scopes of the project license plate recognition system for security in 3 Thai southern-most provinces (DTI-D22), which is one of many projects of the DTI, will be examined. The problems and experiences about the scopes management from the project DTI-D22 will be shared. This includes, how the Thai fiscal year budgetary system and the "waterfall" method way of thinking affect the governmental projects and how the DTI-D22 has dealt with these issues. Additionally, the paper will give an idea, how to define appropriate scopes in a Thai governmental project using the lesson learns from the D22 project. Apart from this, how the DTI-D22 project team reacts to the dynamism from inside and outside the organization is also included. This affects the project scopes significantly. Furthermore, the scope changing process in DTI is shown using D22 as an example. Finally, some facts and lesson-learns about a kind of projects that need to take factors such as the uncertainty nature of research projects into consideration, are presented for further discussion.