Scope Management: Not Always Saying 'No'

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.

  Communications Management   CRM   Risk Management   Scope Management   Stakeholder Management  

Scope management is that ugly two-word phrase that can reduce a lesser project manager to tears. In some minds, it means saying “no” to the customer when they don’t want to hear “no”. In other minds, it means an endless stream of financial requests from the customer because requested work is beyond what was originally agreed upon.

But scope management doesn’t have to be that scary, and it doesn’t have to be that hard. What it does require is organization and diligence not only on the part of the project manager, but also the entire team. You can be certain that if you’re the tech lead on a software project and you are working closely with customer personnel on detailing requirements or early design work that they’re going to ask about a tweak; you might feel inclined to just accommodate their request on the fly because it’s a small amount of work. But that small amount of work lumped together with 30 other small amounts of work can end up causing significant scope creep that the project manager may never fully find out about (other than the fact that the project budget seems to be mysteriously getting out of hand).

What we need to make sure of is this: that we get out of the mindset of being so scared of scope getting out of hand and focus more on setting up the proper oversight of scope. That way, any …

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