Scope Creep: Case Study

According to the Project Management Institute (PMI, 2013), ‘scope creep’ is the incremental expansion of the project’s scope – e.g. through additional work requests - without the necessary readjustment of the other two elements: schedule and cost.

A good project scope points clearly to the expected end results and deliverables of the project. At the planning stage of the overall IT Merger Project, the project planning team had a common overall vision of “get $210 million in annual saving by consolidating the IT structure”. The PCNet project was a sub-project that shared this common overall vision. This overall vision was then systematically drilled down into detailed tasks and sub-projects with schedule carefully deliberated with the dependency of the projects and resources utilized being taken into considerations. A Gantt chart showing the schedule and dependency of task was then created (as shown in Exhibit 2 in the case). The PCNet project team adopted similar approach for project planning (as shown in Exhibit 4 in the

- The methodology for selecting and evaluating did not meet government’s goal of demonstrating equal opportunity, was unfairly designed, broke government purchasing rules, did not follow

Three factors define the success of any project; these are time, cost, and quality (Wysocki and RK 2013: 4). This paper identifies three main facets of project management that were inappropriately implemented, namely; Resourcing, Stakeholder Management, and Risk Management and how their improper implementation led to the violation of the three constraints (i.e. time, cost, and quality).

Mission-creep is when a certain organization is assigned a task and then the organization expands their agenda past the main goal of the original task. There is a desire of the organization to essentially keep going after their initial task has already been completed. An example of this is when the US Department of Agriculture wanted submachine guns for its law enforcers, for this bureaucracy does not and should not have a need for them. Another example would be when the Department of Homeland Security created fusion centers after 9/11 to monitor potential terrorist communication, but these fusions pried into other crimes aside from terrorism. Mission-creep is a potential problem for keeping bureaucracies focused because they are going beyond what is relevant when there are other things to be accomplished. Mission-creep in bureaucracies is essentially like a person who recently cut their lawn to keep it looking nice, but then in turn wanted to keep going and mow the rest of the neighborhood’s lawns as well to make the whole neighborhood look nice.

This is confirmed by Horn (2012:406) that ‘when you consider that only about a quarter of projects complete on time and budget’. Early contingencies planning for the effects of scope creep should be interlaid within the RiBS to manage any financial allowance for such eventuality and to communicate the changes across the project and organisation.

*the City's requirements that a percentage of the project be done by local and minority talent hamstrung BAE to deliver. They were forced to hire subcontractors resulting in longer times and higher costs.

* As explained in the text, scope creep is very common in projects. A formal change control management is difficult to enforce and more often overlooked near the end of the project when scope creep is more common. Recommend strategies to enforce change control

Defining the project scope sets the stage for developing a plan and its primary purpose is to define as clearly as possible the deliverables and to focus project plans (Gray & Larson, 2006). The team has

This is the area that the FBI failed to convey to all involved from the beginning of the project. There was a rush to get the project completed, which caused the scope to not be clearly defined. The FBI wanted to “provide agents with this software as fast as possible. In Depew’s view that meant, “shooting from the hip”” (Goldstein, 2005). We ranked scope clarity as the number one risk because without a clear understanding or plan for implementation of a project you end up blindly making decisions without understanding the impact on the project. A

Firstly, R.Ryan Nelson (2007) referred to 10 of the most infamous IT projects to assert the importance of making a careful analysis of projects that have occurred to help future projects. In order to attest this opinion, he illustrated the case of United Kingdom’s

Was the project scope defined clearly at early stage? Identify one major scope change throughout the project life and discuss the effects of scope changes on project performance?

Project Scope – identifies goals, deliverables, tasks, costs, and deadlines. Project scope is part of project planning.

Uncontrolled scope changes are known as scope creep, which mostly occurs during project execution, which often result in rework, cost overrun and failure to deliver projects on time (Jordan, 2010).

A key activity in project management is assessing project constraints. A project has three limitations: scope, budget and schedule. These limitations are project constraints because they are sensitive to change and have an impact on project risk. Risk is exposure to uncertain outcomes. Project constraints are mutually exclusive. If one constraint changes it affects the others and adjustments may be required to compensate and manage risks. For example, a delay in the schedule can increase the risk that the project will not finish on time. Time is money and delays have a negative impact on the budget. To