Question

Scope creep refers to the tiny, incremental change or addition of requirements to an already-defined project so that, for example, a project that began by trying to produce a single ham sandwich ended up trying to produce a three-course meal for 20 people.

For this discussion, describe a time when scope creep happened on a project in which you were involved. The project you describe may be from work (such as being affected by an IT upgrade project), school (such as participating in a team assignment), or personal life (such as planning a wedding).

• Who was responsible for adding requirements?
• Who was responsible for accepting them?
• Were the additional requirements introduced early in the project process, or late?
• What were the outcomes? That is, was the expanded scope implemented, or not?
• Did the project come in over budget? Was it delayed? Was it cancelled?

If you have never been involved in any type of project in which scope creep occurred, research specific causes of project scope creep and share at least two causes

Answer 1

Project : Managing a pet show for the local pet rescue shelter

The local pet shelter asked for volunteers to help organise a dog show next quarter, for fund-raising, awareness building and to help have the new baby pets adopted as soon as possible. The project scope initially was to showcase around 50 of the pets from the shelter, make around 100 flyers and brochures with pictures of the 20 odd puppies, that visitors could take away and hopefully would result in more adoptions in the coming weeks. A dog competition was arranged to encourage people to come with their pets, and prizes offered in several categories. 5-6 food vendors were contracted to bring in their food trucks/trolleys/cooking ranges etc. to provide food for an expected max of 100 visitors. The local veterinarian and a owner of a large pet food store were to be the judges, and advertising was sought from both as well as other food stores and pet accessories stores. The local shelter invited around 200 families and expected 100 visitors in all.

The requirements were supposed to come strictly from the local authorities around location and crowd management, and the pet shelter around the actual parameters of the pet show. All requirements were to be sent to me, the project manager, who would vet them and review their feasibility before coordinating them with other agencies. After a month of planning, additional requirements started coming in from the key stakeholders - another branch of this pet shelter wanted to share the expenses and showcase their animals, meaning twice as many as originally planned. The sharing of expenses was an attractive prospect and so the first pet shelter readily agreed. Due to pressure from both shelters, the additional scope was adopted and had to be accommodated in the planning and execution. The pet shelters then decided to expand the program to include other pets - kittens. The brochures which were already designed but luckily not printed, had to be re-designed to include the new puppies and kittens. The new shelter also indicated that around 60 more people would be invited by them and possibly 50 of those might attend at the most. The location was a large field and so the location didn't need to be implemented, however additional food vendors now needed to be contracted to feed an additional 50 visitors. This required more people to get involved, additional workflows and authorisations and much more cost and time effort. A month before the event, the local pet shelter said it now expected another 100 visitors based on the good feedback received from customers and new visitors.

The initial budget was around 5,000 (from donors) and went to almost 15,000 by the end of the project. The additional cost was also due to the time constraint - the pet show was already announced and so to accommodate this project constraint, the cost was stretched. The pet show with the much larger scope was hurried in the short time frame and the quality of deliverables suffered - last minute vendors weren't up to scratch, there was not enough food to go around, not enough flyers/brochures etc.  

Issues :

- Wrong assumptions : The pet shelter did not check with all its invitees about their attendance and this lead to a wrong assumption about number of visitors

- Stakeholder involvement was bypassed : The shelter also did not check in with its sister concern (second pet shelter) to see if they could plan the project together

- Inadequate requirements analysis : The shelter had fewer kittens and did not initially include them in their requirements planning, however once both shelters were involved they came up with new requirements as together they had a substantial number of kittens they wanted to have adopted.

- Gold plating : The shelter assumed adding kittens would increase their customer satisfaction however, the logistics of managing cats and dogs in the same show became very difficult and ending up adding extensively to the cost (fences, different tents)