It seems inevitable....
A project can often take on a life of its own, and before you know it,
scope creep happens. Most of us are familiar with the concept of scope creep.
It’s not uncommon for the members of a project team to “try to improve the
project’s output as the program progresses, a phenomenon known as scope creep”
(Portny, Mantel, Meredith, Shafer, Sutton, & Kramer, 2008, p. 346). Scope
creep occurs when the specifications of a project are increased mid-steam, usually
as a result of a well-intentioned desire to improve the end results of a
project.
No matter how hard members of a team might try to resist
scope creep, it’s not an unusual occurrence. I think it often stems from the
enthusiastic desires of project team members to create a fantastic project. This
happened to a project I was recently involved in. I was part of a team creating
a curriculum for accelerated, self-paced online CIS (computer information
science) program. Our goal was to create a path for displaced adult workers to
return to college and complete a college certification in a shortened
timeframe, so that they could get back out into the workforce with a credential
that would help pave the way for them to secure new employment. Our project was
focused not just on creating the online curriculum, but also on helping these
displaced worker students successfully find new employment after they finished
the certificate program. Well into the project, we realized that this student
population lacked certain knowledge and skills that they would need to find
good future employment. They needed help with things like preparing their
resumes, knowing how to search for jobs in the 21st century, and practicing
their interviewing skills. Into the project, we decided to create an online,
self-paced course that we would offer as a free resource to our student
population. This course wasn’t required as part of the CIS certification, but
it would certainly help them better prepare for finding and securing future
employment. This new component to our project certainly added to our workload
and put stress on already fully committed resources, but we decided that the
added work was worth it, because of the value that the additional course would provide
to our students.
So, how does a project manager plan for scope creep? “Project
managers must expect change and be prepared to deal with it. Fighting change is
not appropriate. The best approach is to set up a well-controlled, formal
process whereby changes can be introduced and accomplished with as little
distress as possible” (Portny et al., 2008, p. 346). In hindsight, maybe if we
had planned better (i.e., done more brainstorming at the beginning of the
project to determine what the project would need), we might have anticipated
the extra course in the beginning, which certainly would have helped us in the
initial planning work. But we didn’t. And we made the decision, in the midst of
the project, to add this additional course to our project despite the added
pressure it put on resources and our schedule. The resources who would be
responsible for the extra work were the ones who ultimately made the decision
to go forward with the extra course. It was definitely scope creep, but the
team as a whole decided it was worth the extra work.
References
Portny, S. E., Mantel,
S. J., Meredith, J. R., Shafer, S. M., Sutton, M. M., & Kramer, B. E.
(2008). Project management: Planning, scheduling, and controlling projects.
Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
