Handling Scope Creep

Scope creep is one of the biggest problems a project manager has to deal with.  The availability of new material can be a cause of scope creep or sometimes even new rules and regulations; the end result is that the scope expands and the project manager must determine how to proceed.  Often times, changes may seem small and that they won’t require more time or resources to accomplish but these can grow into larger changes and jeopardize the success of the project if not thoroughly reviewed and evaluated before approval (Portny, Mantel, Meredith, Shafer, Sutton, & Kramer, 2008).

One of the first projects I worked on as a new educator was an upgrade of our e-mail system from GroupWise 5 to GroupWise 5.5.  My role as the educator was to identify the most common current uses of the system and develop the training material, curriculum and provide instructor led classes so the staff would know how to use the system to perform their jobs when we went live.  Well into the project, someone determined that we should also introduce the Document Management feature which allowed shared file storage.  This certainly changed things drastically from a training perspective.  Staff already had existing knowledge of e-mail used in a corporate setting however shared files were pretty much unheard of at that point; the cloud did not exist.  The technicians also needed to build extra servers to accommodate additional files and network security needed to be introduced.  For several weeks, the team really tried to pull it off.  In the end though, there just weren’t enough resources on the project to accomplish the extra goals and objectives associated with document management.  We rolled back to the original project, now with a delayed timeline, and started implementing just the e-mail upgrade.  

Now that I have a bit more experience as a team member and as a project manager, I can

see that this could have been avoided if a change management procedure had been put in
place before any requests for change occurred.  When a project manager is faced with

making a decision, they may feel pressured to give a quick answer and not think thoroughly about all of the consequences (Portny, Mantel, Meredith, Shafer, Sutton, & Kramer, 2008).  A project manager should evaluate change requests closely so they can be analyzed so that impacts to the schedule, cost, or objectives can be clearly articulated and defended to the project sponsor for written approval (Greer, 2010).  By gathering and sharing all of the pertinent information, the stakeholders can choose if the change is worth the impacts it could cause. 

References

Greer, M. (2010). The project management minimalist: Just enough PM to rock your projects! (Laureate custom ed.). Baltimore: Laureate Education, Inc.

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.