According
to Portny, Mantel, Meredith, Shafer, and Sutton, Scope creep is "the
natural tendency of the client, as well as project team members, to try to
improve the project's output as the project progresses" (2008). An example
of scope creep is the addition of fields in an implementation which was half
way completed. I once worked for an organization which was implementing a new
customer management system. A team was created to plan and design the system
for 20 branches of the company. The budget and plans were created and the
system was designed. Once the program was developed and tested and implemented
(installed) throughout 15 branches, the branch manager of the branch I worked
in decided that additional fields in the program were to be added to facilitate
data tracking due to the uniqueness of the business and its clientele. The request
was necessary; however, it delayed the implementation by two months for all of
the branches. Due to how the program was created, the additional fields could
not be implemented by just adding them; the fields had to be added to the
original program and installed in every branch where the program had already been
installed even if the fields would not
be used. In this case, the program had to be rewritten, retested, and
reinstalled in 15 branches where the implementation had already taken place and
installed in the other 5 branches including ours.
Extra expenses were incurred in
labor; the company was charged double for the labor to write the program. In
addition, due to the time this consumed, the company had to pay for travel and
lodging of the technicians who were contracted for the implementation of the
programs due to the extended time required. In all, the company spent an extra
$28,000 than budgeted. Had I been the project manager responsible for the project, I would ensure that I defined all the
needs of the project in detail per branch to ensure I address every branch's needs individually and to assure that the implementation would be completed within the
allotted time and would have stayed within the defined budget.
References
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.
