Scope Creep Project Manager's Nightmare Experience

 

When a project starts every team member is hopeful for the great success of the project. The excitement will all be focused on realizing the scope of the project as proposed by stakeholders and as agreed by the project team and team manager. No one will be expecting the project manager's nightmare, project scope creeps. This is what happened when we had a church project, constructing a building in South Africa. The main scope of the project was to build the main church building but It ended up being changed to become the main church building combined with the offices and guest restrooms together. 

 The scope of the project is understood as " The extent of what project will produce (product scope) and the work needed to produce it (project scope). (Project Management Institute, 2008). In project management, one thing that is taken on board is that managing scope is an essential component of a project manager's role, especially after the commencement and when the project is underway and scope creep begins to appear. Project scope creep is taken to be, "Adding additional features or functions of a new product, requirements, or work that is not authorized low. beyond the agreed- upon scope). " (Larson & Larson, 2009) In our project, we had project scope as the outline of the requirements and deliverables that were agreed upon by the stakeholders and the team. This was defined at the beginning of the project planning process and was captured in the project plan, in the roadmap. In our project planning, we did project Stakeholder identification, steps to identify all individuals or institutions that were interested in, or have a concern in the current project, were taken and documentation of all relevant information, all relevant regarding their expectations, involvement, and influence on the project outcomes was done. 

 We had the understanding that project stakeholders Identification essentially contributes to increasing the probability of the project's success and reducing scope creep because it allows developing and using certain approaches in identifying and documenting the interest and impacts of organizations or people, involved in the project. One thing we never anticipated was the change of stakeholders as the change of the pastor for the church for our project. This happened when the building foundation had been dug and bricks were being layered down for the foundation. The initial plan was just to build the main building of the church wall without the offices included but the offices were to be constructed separately, this resulted in the scope creeps. A new stakeholder got pulled into a project and we were forced to discuss about things that had taken off the ground. 

 The Situation was unavoidable, the church is an international organization hence chances are high that one Pastor can be sent off to another congregation based on the needs, and for us, scope creep became a reality. In our sight, we took it as a challenge and had to adjust and meet the demand in order to have a successful project, but this was also an oversight that had happened when the stakeholder Identification process was being done. It was only done on the Local branch level with the understanding that all the financing and decision-making was being done at that level, which if it had been done with an eagle’s eye perspective would have guided us to realize that most of the organization's buildings, all had offices alongside the church hall, not separately. Hence there is always a greater need for a comprehensive stakeholder identified especially when dealing with an international organization.

 References:

Atesmen, M. K. (2015). Project Management Case Studies and Lessons Learned: Stakeholder, scope, knowledge, schedule, resource, and team management. CRC Press. 

 Bourne, L. (2016). Stakeholder relationship management: A maturity model for organizational implementation. Gower. 

 Larson, R., & Larson, E. (2009, October 13). Top five causes of SCOPE CREEP - Project Management Institute. Retrieved August 14, 2022, from https://www.pmi.org/learning/library/top-five-causes-scope-creep-6675 

 Project Management Institute. (2008). A guide to the project management body of knowledge (PMBOK® guide)— Fourth Edition. Newtown Square, PA: Author. 

Stakeholder management - PMI. (n.d.). Retrieved July 18, 2022, from https://www.pmi.org/learning/library/stakeholder-management-task-project-success-7736 

Walden University, LLC. (Executive Producer). (n.d.). Monitoring projects [Video file]. Retrieved from https://class.waldenu.edu 

 Walden University, LLC. (Executive Producer). (n.d.). Practitioner voices: You can’t win them all [Video file]. Retrieved from https://class.waldenu.edu