A stakeholder’s desire to increase project scope: A mini case study
From the Thoughts on Project Management Blog
by Gina Abudi
Articles will focus on the the people-side of project management - team leadership, communication, virtual teams, change management and cultural diversity.
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You are working on a project to implement an online benefits management portal to enable employees to have a “one stop” location to view their health and dental benefits, get answers to benefits-related questions, and enable for changes to be made to health benefit coverage. Requirements were gathered over a two week time period at the start of the project and all stakeholders participated in requirements gathering sessions. The project is near completion – the portal has been developed by the IT/Application Development group. It has been tested, works well and will be rolled out early next week.
You are approached by a member of the senior leadership team who suggests that it would be of value to add in a component so that employees can also manage their 401Ks. In fact, he wants this to happen in time for this roll out.
What should you do?
Here is what you might do: Obviously trying to add in the 401K component now is not a good idea. However, the idea of adding in this functionality is a good idea! As the project manager, talk to the stakeholder who desires this change and acknowledge it is a wonderful idea that will certainly be of value to the employees. However, to add it in now means that the following would have to occur:
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The release date of the online benefits management portal will need to be delayed in order to develop and then test this addition to the portal. Releasing the new component before fully testing risks the success of the project.
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IT/Application Development team members, who have been deployed to other projects, would need to be brought back to work on this component or additional resources will need to be found. This will increase costs on the project.
Suggest that the following may be options:
By acknowledging that the idea is a great one, but needs time to be prepared to enable for success and suggesting some options enables the project manager to have a better conversation with the stakeholder and to ensure that the right approach is taken for this addition to the product.
What else might you do? How would you handle this request?
Posted on: November 26, 2015 06:17 AM |
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Comments (4)
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Mike Frenette
Manager, IT PMO| Halifax Water (retired)
Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada
Interesting post, Gina, about a situation with which we are often faced. There is some key questions here: Is this missed requirement key? Will the absence of this feature in the product cause the entire project to be considered a failure? On the surface, it may seem like this is a bolt-on that is not necessary. Maybe it is, maybe it isn't.
The project manager is not the decision maker here. I would leverage the change control process. Have an initial conversation with the project sponsor, then ask the stakeholder who brought it up to provide detail on the request in writing, and schedule a meeting with the project sponsor to discuss whether this should be considered a post-release enhancement or a valid scope expansion with an accompanying increase in resources and a schedule delay. If the sponsor agrees and can provide the funding and suffer the delay, the next step would be to communicate the positive aspects of the delay and the added necessary functionality, starting with to the executive steering committee to gain final approval.
In any project the iron triangle questions must be asked - What is more important time, scope/quality, schedule? The answers will help you as the PM know which carries the most weight, and it may be that on this particular project, scope/quality is the most important.
It''s the old adage: "It's important to do it right, not right now." Or is it? :)
Both "agile" and "lean" philosophies would support actions to implement what you can at this time, so that benefits for those improvements can begin. I agree that a simple link to the existing application is a very good low-cost response. While the concept of unifying all benefits in one application is a great idea, the 401k piece must be analyzed, and my opinion is that it should be a Phase 2 of the project. However, as Mike Frenette mentioned, if the project will not be considered successful without the 401k aspects, that could change things. The alternatives you''ve listed, plus the ones you accumulate here should be shared with The Steering Committee, Project Sponsor, Product Owner, and/or Project Stakeholders (as appropriate) so that they can make a decision. And they may have other ideas as well!
Gina Abudi
President| Abudi Consulting LLC
Amherst, Nh, United States
Thanks for your thoughts Mike and John. Mike - great ideas and questions to consider. You are right the project manager is not the decision maker here and having a conversation with the sponsor and leveraging the change control process is essential. John - true that key stakeholders may have other ideas on options available. I often tell project managers not to react when something like this occurs - it is often easy to jump to an immediate "no, we can't do that" or another dramatic reaction without really thinking through all the possibilities and asking the right questions.
Sergio Luis Conte
Helping to create solutions for everyone| Worldwide based Organizations
Buenos Aires, Argentina
Fully agree with @Mike and I have some disagreement with @John about agile methods will help in this situations. Agile methods have a change control process defined (some method explicit and some implicit) inside them. So, no matter the method or approach you are using, as @Mike said, we need to have clear that the project manager will not decide about that and the project change control process must be followed.
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