The Line in the Sand

Brad Egeland is an IT/project management consultant and author with over 25 years of software development, management and project management experience leading initiatives in manufacturing, government contracting, gaming and hospitality, retail operations, aviation and airline, pharmaceutical, start-ups, healthcare, higher education, not-for-profit, high-tech, engineering and general IT.

  CRM   Estimating   Scope Management   Stakeholder Management  

Have you ever said to anyone, “This is it...this is all I can take!” or “This is as far as I will go!”? You are essentially identifying your outer boundary, your maximum give before you take your toys and go home.

This is basically how it was with project scope management. The project manager must act as the gatekeeper between what the project team has been tasked to do and what they are being asked to do. Those two things may start out being the same, but on nearly every project since the beginning of time they have ended up being different by anywhere from a few hours of effort to several hundred or even thousands of hours of effort. The project manager must recognize these “extra” requests for what they are and not let that requirements line in the sand be moved without a complete understanding and agreement among all parties--and a documented change that identifies how the project budget and hours are going to be affected by said change.

Here’s how the process works…

Identifying that a change is about to occur
The process starts when the customer makes a request that you think is outside the agreed-upon scope of the project. Your team may help you manage scope, but as the ultimate gatekeeper it’s the project manager’s responsibility to raise the red flag when it seems that work is being requested …

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