Preventing ‘Alignment Creep’

Andy Jordan is President of Roffensian Consulting S.A., a Roatan, Honduras-based management consulting firm with a comprehensive project management practice. Andy always appreciates feedback and discussion on the issues raised in his articles and can be reached at [email protected]. Andy's new book Risk Management for Project Driven Organizations is now available.

  Portfolio Management   Strategy  

Ask any project manager about scope creep and they understand exactly what you mean--the not uncommon situation of features and deliverables being added to the project through change (managed or otherwise) and resulting in an expanded or different scope from what was originally approved.

When it comes to strategic initiatives, there is a similar concept: alignment creep, where the project diverges from the original alignment between project and strategy. A project is approved to contribute an expected amount of benefit to one or more strategies. When the project varies from that contribution and/or strategy area, we have alignment creep. For a number of different reasons, that can be much harder to manage. However, the implications of alignment creep can be far more significant for the organization, so that’s what I want to look at in this article.

The drivers of alignment creep
The first thing we need to do is understand what causes alignment creep to occur, and this is where life immediately becomes much more complex than scope creep. There are many different drivers of alignment creep, and generally multiple factors are in play. Let’s review the different factors we have to consider:

• Alignment is harder to recognize and understand. Scope is explicitly defined--it is documented and directly matches to the deliverables of the project requiring …

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