Stop the Creep – or at least contain it!

All projects change – may be not quite a truism but close enough!  Life happens and it WILL have an effect on your project.

Upfront planning can help develop contingency planning and well as conducting an FMEA (Failure Modes Effects Analysis) to anticipate some events (i.e. Customs officers holding up equipment at the border).  Mother Nature though has been known to be unpredictable, delaying shipments, changing costs and even damaging equipment.  Imagine those companies in flooded Queensland, Australia who have literally seen their plants go down the river!

Once a project has been initiated, a huge challenge for any project team is sticking to the original scope.  While the previous examples have been more of an emergency, once the projects begins, many more people become involved and start wanting things added or changed.  These changes to the project are termed “scope creep”.

During the planning phase, a stakeholder analysis can help identify those people who may want to see a slightly different outcome or who will place a higher priority on different aspects of the project.  This again allows the team to develop a contingency strategy.  Even more important at this time is to develop a scope change strategy.

A scope change strategy can be broken into 3 parts:

1. Approvals – who needs to agree to the change in order for it to go ahead
2. Criteria – what conditions have to be met to accept the change (ie safety, cost, quality)
3. Impact – analysis of the impact it will have on the 3 success criteria; cost, performance and timeline

Communicating the strategy to team members and stakeholders will help reduce tension and ensure a fair process is being used, making things overall go smoothly.

Scope Creep

As it happened, as soon as they left the 2nd meeting about the aseptic project charter, Eva received several e-mails from Sales and Marketing and from Corporate engineering.



After reading them, she called Edge of Control in to discuss how to manage the new demands and expectations from key stakeholders.



First we explained that this is called scope creep! As a project moves along, more information is uncovered, new external events occur and suddenly the project is having to solve climate change as well as world hunger.



Sounds easy but the first step is holding firm to initial commitments. The charter was built for this exact eventuality. Several questions need to be asked:


1. How does this new item relate to the original issue and objective of the project?

2. What risk to project success and the issue does it bring with it? And what is the risk to the project if it is NOT dealt with?

3. Will it impact the three cornerstones of a project – time, quality and cost? And by how much?

4. Can it be resolved with a stand alone project that is run concurrently? Do you have the resources to do it this way?



The folks at Curds and Whey went over this list as well as determining what stage of the process it would impact (they used a process map to help with this) and with some debate by different parties, the scope of the project was increased to include two of the points, two were set up as independent but concurrent projects and the last two were rejected.



There was no doubt that this would not be the last time they would have to face the issue of scope creep, but now a system was in place to consider the impact of the creep and determine if they should go down any other future paths.