Question

Mary Kate is a project manager in the IT department for a university. She has been asked to manage a project to create a faculty intranet. The university has multiple campuses in various locations, and professors and other faculty need to be able to easily post questions, schedules and other documents to share in a secure environment.

Mary Kate performed the following steps to begin the intranet project.

She performed a needs analysis. Mary Kate interviewed the university faculty to determine their needs for an intranet and the uses they foresee for it. She discovered that several of the professors were working on a research project and wanted to use the intranet to facilitate group discussions, as well as to host periodic Webinars for professors at other universities.

She chose the project team. Mary Kate enlisted members of the IT department for the project, including someone to install firewalls so users have more secure access to the Internet, and someone to set up the site to host Webinars.

She determined the project constraints. Mary Kate determined when the intranet needed to be live. She considered how long she would have the services of the various team members, how long team members could work on this project before being assigned to other tasks, and when the first Webinar was scheduled. Once she gathered all of this information, she was able to determine the project scope and constraints.

She created the project schedule. Mary Kate worked with the project team to outline the tasks and task relationships required to complete the project. She assigned resources to specific tasks so that each person was aware of his or her role in the overall project plan.

She scheduled weekly meetings for the duration of the project. Mary Kate included the CIO, project team members, faculty members and all other stakeholders in the meetings.

She created a project status report and an issues log. Mary Kate used these documents in each meeting to apprise stakeholders of the project's progress and to introduce any problems or issues that had arisen since the last meeting.

Once Mary Kate had performed all these tasks, she was ready to begin the executing phase of the project.

How might scope creep occur in this project? How could it be managed?

Answer 1

The scope creep occurs when there is a continuous change, features, functionality etc of the already started project. When such continuous changes happens without considering the cost, resources, time etc of the project then the scope of the project will be impacted. The primary reason behind the scope creep is the improper documentation, definition and controlling of the project scope.

The scope of the project defines what has to be achieved, the deliverables, features and functionalities of the project, the costs etc. In the given case the MK conducts the research for the intranet project, gathers information from the staff members, assign task to the members, organize meetings, provides feed backs etc. but she has failed to define the scope of the project. She hasn’t defined the goal or objectives of the project to the team members. They remain ambiguous about the deliverables and the cost of the project. Hence the probability of scope creep is higher as per the given case.

In the given case the scope creep can be managed or handled through the following steps.

• Communicating the scope, objectives, and goals of the project to all stake holders.
• Make the stake holders understand about the deliverables and the outcome.
• The cost and benefits of the project can be highlighted.
• The deadline and the work schedule can be communicated in prior.