Anticlue

Project Blunders – Scope Creep

Scope creep is a great and vile thing. Its great because enthusiasm is occurring and people are wanting to do more with the project. It is vile because it has a potential to kill the project timeline, budget, and bring unjustified risks.

So how does one handle the ever challenging scope creep as a project manager? First, its best to have everyone know what has been committed to for the deliverables. A high level deliverable overview with the team is always a good thing. Next, clearly define how to change the scope of the project within the project organization for example.

First, there needs to be a change sponsor, who is responsible for quantifying the change. They should be able to produce a document with the change described, the impact of the change to timeline, budget, any new risks of the change. The benefits and disadvantages of the change.

This document then needs to go to the leadership group for finalization, here the pm endorses the change, the project sponsor endorses the change, and the executive sponsor endorses the change. At this point the scope creep is a managed change. Now some changes are no-brainers, others appear to be no-brainers but have hidden impacts. This basically gets everyone on board with a way to make changes occur to the project scope after the project has been defined.