Prevention and Cure from Scope Creep

Prevention and Cure from Scope Creep

Sugandha Singh

Worcester Polytechnic Institute

Author Note

Sugandha Singh, Management in Information Technology, Worcester Polytechnic Institute.        

This paper was written to fill partial requirements of the course MIS 576–Project Management.

Correspondence concerning this paper should be addressed to Sugandha Singh, Management in Information Technology, Worcester Polytechnic Institute, Worcester, MA 01609.

Contact: ssingh@wpi.edu.

Abstract

Scope creep is a major risk and serves as most dominant factor which hampers success of the project. The paper will briefly explain the major factors like cost overruns, delays or technology failures that leads to Scope creep. It will also illustrate the significance of project management strategies for achieving project success that in-turn yields total customer satisfaction and establishes industry in the market. This paper put forth how technology and methodology can impact scope creep by explaining a case of migration project of a leading telecom industry of Canada that engaged IBM India to upgrades all its IT Application within fixed time and cost.

Knowledge of impact of domain and technology can ensure the baseline of requirement specifications that would reduce overhead and unseen scope creep and improvise the quality of projects and productivity of the company. Rest of the paper focuses on recommendations that can be used to handle the situation in time of Scope creep and precaution to be taken in order to avoid such tough situation.

        Keywords: Scope Creep, Software Development life Cycle, Project Management Process.

Introduction

Every year billions of dollar are invested in IT projects that fail to deliver the intended results. According to Standish Group in 2010, more than 60% IT projects fell short of their goals due to, over budget or failed to accomplish the specified requirements or delay in deliverables [1]. Most of the time the Scope creep is certain to happen because the clients and vendor focus on visualizing the resultant rather than emphasizing on the long path and processes involved in the success of the project. The project success goes along with hand in hand with continuous effort and picking right strategies. The initialization of any project starts with the basic understanding of the requirement specification and defining the boundaries of the requirements based on the knowledge of the technology as well as the processes to be incorporated for the implementation in order to evaluate the precise time and accurate cost estimation. The primary concern of project scope management is specifying and controlling what is and is not included in the project. Technical side of project always succeed by implementing the project management iron triangle which is quality centric with three vertices followed as: cost, time and scope [2]. Therefore, project management triangle insists the scope is always renowned as the crucial effective component for the project success. The most common reason for project failure is poor management of the project scope, either because the project manager did not invest enough time defining the work, absence of contract on the scope by stakeholders or lack of scope management leads to summation of work before and during development which are not budgeted in the original project, this phenomena is known as scope creep. Project costs increases and delivery date extends when uncontrolled changes are included in original project, such situations arises due to ambiguous requirements, improper setup and unclear assumptions.