Increasing Scope: A Creepy Proposition?

Kenneth has 14 years of healthcare experience in government and private industry. Over eight years of experience managing healthcare IT projects, operations, contracts, and personnel. His work experience includes project management, contracts and procurements, data analysis, claims adjudication, business writing, and business process modeling. Kenneth was certified in 2006 as a Project Management Professional.

  Scope Management  

Scope can be a bad word among project managers and business owners. Tell a business owner that their requirement will increase scope, and they won’t look at you in a friendly manner. Their response will be along the lines of, “How much will this cost me?”

Tell a project manager that the scope is in question or lacking certain important components, and he or she will look at the carefully laid out project schedule in despair, knowing that it will soon be a mess of late dates and brand new tasks that must be fit into the timelines.

Despite the initial revulsion to scope, there will be valid times on a project when the scope will need to increase--and the project manager needs to be prepared to deal with it.

The Rationale

Before you consider that there might be a good reason to increase scope, there has to be a rationale for it. This should be carefully thought out and vetted through the project team. Just because the client starts yelling about new requirements does not automatically mean the project scope should be changed.

The new requirements should be evaluated in order to determine if they are truly necessary, and if they truly mean that something needs to be added to the original scope--perhaps they could be part of a different project or handled by the functionality already planned for the project. Whatever information is brought forward …

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