Seven Tips to Keep Your Projects on Track
by Rekha Narayan, SEI Information Technology

Controlling and managing scope change, sometimes known as scope creep, is critical to the success of any project. Changes in scope can significantly impact the cost, schedule, risks, and quality of the entire effort. Your ability to manage, limit, and document the changes also affects your organization’s ability to support those projects.

While a project’s scope is typically defined early in the planning and estimation phases, there are many good reasons for changing it later in the process — for example, a stakeholder may acquire additional insight into a problem during the course of the project. External market conditions and government regulations can also drive requests that extend beyond the initial project scope. The key to successful scope management is defining, communicating, and reconciling emerging requests throughout the project lifecycle.

Why scope management is important
No one questions the relevance of change management for project scope, which can involve project deliverables, services delivery, and work content. In particular, there are four reasons why scope management must be a top priority for successful project managers:

1. Cost -- Scope change can affect work that has already been performed. That means money spent reworking project components that have been engineered and at least partially developed. The overall cost is even greater when the components have been completed.
   
2. Schedule -- With each scope change, precious project resources are diverted to activities that weren’t identified in the original scope, leading to pressure on the project schedule. Project managers must also consider impact on the project’s critical path.
   
3. Quality -- When not analyzed thoroughly, scope changes often lead to quick fixes that can affect product quality, support, and future enhancements.
   
4. Morale -- Scope changes can cause a loss of control of the team’s planned work. Changing focus or direction to meet the change requests, having to rework components, and a perceived lack of structure all frustrate project teams and adversely impact morale.

What happens when scope isn’t well managed? Here are a few real-world examples that show how critical it is to manage scope creep.
Case 1: Requirements documents have been written and a project plan created to produce a large Web-based product around core specifications. As the specifications are written and reviewed, new faces are added to the committees and innocent statements emerge like, “You know it will need to…”, “Come to think of it…,” and “By the way…” The specifications then begin to change rapidly. As a result of poor scope change management, the modified specifications include conflicting and ambiguous statements. Integration issues arise, quality suffers, and costs rise.

Recommendations: The project manager should have recognized that the comments from the new members were more than minor details -- they were scope changes. It would be appropriate to call a scope management meeting with the stakeholders to review a consolidated list of the comments and revise plans and schedule accordingly.

Case 2: A product selection project is underway based on an identified plan. During the initial project phase, the scope of user involvement is increased significantly and additional deliverables are identified. It’s important to keep the project moving and the project schedule and budget are never revised which leads to significant delivery issues.

Recommendations: The project manager should be aware of scope creep and requested meetings with all stakeholders to redefine and review the project. This should happen at every phase of the project when changes are made. When the scope is increased, it should have been accompanied by change requests and proper status reporting and accounting.

The way it should happen: The project manager identifies a set of scope points during the initial conversations with the stakeholders and reaches consensus with stakeholders and the project team at the project kickoff meeting. Each project review meeting agenda includes a scope review as an item. This process ensures that the project scope is clearly articulated and reinforced by a small set of statements. Requested scope changes are easily identified and brought to the attention of the stakeholders for consideration.

Seven tips to managing scope
1. Proactively identify change -- Scope changes happen. To deal with them effectively, project managers should take an active role in identifying changes with stakeholders and team members. By being proactive, project managers can incorporate the vital changes necessary to address stakeholders’ issues and concerns.

2. Get sponsor approval -- Always get the sponsor’s approval and buy-in for the change request before authorizing any work. If it’s difficult to have the sponsor review every change, ask him/her to review sets of change requests. As another alternative, project managers can classify changes as routine or needing further analysis before work can be done.

3. Analyze the impact -- It’s easy to conduct superficial change impact analysis, however the repercussions are often unpleasant. An impact analysis needs to consider all the configuration items that are affected by the change, and review the associated costs.

4. Communicate changes -- In a large project team, changes can be overlooked if they aren’t communicated in a timely, formal process. People like to know what they’re working on and to be kept informed of project decisions. Proper team communication is essential to understanding and overcoming resistance to change.

5. Avoid Scope Creep -- Scope creep occurs when changes are allowed without proper impact analysis, and without reviewing schedule and cost implications. This is common with repetitive minor incremental adjustments, where the project budget and schedule aren’t kept in sync with the effort involved in making the changes. In this scenario, there’s no way to avoid runaway project syndrome. Scope creep is a symptom of a process problem. The solution is to implement a process to track each change and control its implementation.

6. Prioritize wisely -- All change requests are equal in the eyes of the stakeholders who raise them. It’s up to the project manager to be diligent about what has priority and what can wait. That said, prioritizing change requests should involve stakeholders to achieve consensus.

7. Implement QA processes -- Scope change can completely derail a project. The key is to keep ongoing systems working while introducing changes in a phased way. One way to do that is through product releases that implement an identified list of changes. Proper quality assurance procedures are a must to keep the changes from introducing unwanted side effects.

Project change management is critical to keeping the cost, schedule, and quality of any project under control. While there are no secret recipes for managing project scope creep, there are important steps that project managers can take, such as being proactive, obtaining sponsor approval, making change communications a priority, and implementing solid quality assurance procedures to keep projects on track and successful.

About the author
Rekha Narayan is a Subject Matter Expert in vendor evaluations, test automation assessments, and process consulting for SEI Information Technology. A Six Sigma trained IT consultant, Ms. Narayan has over 11 years of experience in project management, product development, quality assurance, and business analysis. For more information contact SEI at (630) 413-5050, info@sei-it.com, or www.sei-it.com.