After I talked about “functional specifications” as another key challenge and source for project inefficiencies last month, as part of my 12 article series on project inefficiencies the logical next topic is “Scope Management”. Within this broad topic, I want to also mention something peculiar, that every project manager knows: Scope creep. Everyone knows you should avoid it, but it keeps happening. It is a never-ending story. Unfortunately, there is also no easy solution to avoid it either.
Proper scope management has many components that need to be considered – starting with project planning, staffing, sourcing, and execution. I believe the proper management of scopes is a task for the whole team and relevant through all phases – you and your team have to live, breath and dream it.
I would like to share the main challenges most project managers – not only, but especially when working in IT – experience when it comes to scope management:
- The classical starting point and one of the main reasons for project failures is that the product scope is not defined at the beginning of a project. Defined means documented and signed-off by all stakeholders, including business. Sometimes the product scope is “defined and documented”, but not officially approved and signed off by the party who originally requested it and will be approving the final solution. In these situations, scope management can get difficult.
- Having no change management process to manage the scope is another classic. If you don’t have somebody knowledgeable to manage the process and the scope, you have the next issue. Scope management requires a very deep understanding of the functional requirements, a solid business background and good knowledge of the current situation as well as the target. Usually, this is a very senior role, but it might not be staffed correctly.
- Sometimes change management processes can be very intense, requiring a lot of documentation and effort – which makes it very unattractive to actually stick to them. As a result, the effort needed to deal with small to medium change requests is higher than the actual change implementation work. Consequently, the process is not followed, and implementation teams just implement the required changes to make their life easier.
- Often, I see project managers do scope management themselves. Within small projects, this is fully understandable and valid, as a project manager needs to add more value than just tracking progress and managing issues and risks. But in large projects, this setup leads to a bottleneck and as a result, another part of the project manager's tasks is not completed.
- Another classic is one version of scope creep: business representatives are constantly requiring more – but if neither the project manager nor any of the steering committee can refuse these requests, then you clearly have a governance issue.
So what can a project manager do to handle these challenges?
- The project manager must ensure that the scope is defined at the beginning of the project – documented and signed off by all stakeholders – including business and the project team.
- The scope needs to be defined and managed regardless of the methodology you have chosen for your implementation (waterfall, agile). Scope management might be easier with a classical waterfall model, but also with the agile methodology, scope management is required.
- There needs to be a change management process, known to every project team member. The process should be as lean as possible. If the processes are too complex, there is an increased risk that they will not be followed.
- To avoid team members trying to make their life as easy as possible by not following protocol, ensure that all team members (internal and external) are measured towards the same target e.g. based on the number of PDs they need for implementation in comparison to how much they have estimated. The aim is to ensure that they implement the agreed scope as fast as possible and that changes are treated separately.
- You also need to align individual contractors towards these goals. Their hidden target might be to prolong their engagement as much as possible – and as a result, they might implement additional requests without asking. In such instances, the project manager needs to make it clear, that this is a very short-term approach: Contractors who do not represent the interests of their customers are usually not hired a second time.
- For me personally, it is also key to staff a good functional, solution and technical architect and team. Throughout each project, there are many scope questions and issues, therefore the project manager must have an architect or a team he or she can fully rely on.
So in sum, scope management is not just a project management responsibility, it’s a task for the overall project team. All project team members must know the scope and have an intention to support and manage it. Incentives must be created to ensure all project team members strive towards a lean implementation. Only if the project manager has his/her team aligned, then scope management will be successful.
