Schedule Creep

I meant to say: Finish the project with extended time and over-budget. I am used to calling these damages, sorry for the confusion.

I think that if creep moves beyond scope it's a communication issue. You raise this. Firstly, talk to your BA. Does this map to business value identified in the requirements and backwards to the business case. You then take those findings to your sponsor. Do they accept the additional scope, despite your opinions one way or another.

When a decision has been made, you can flatten, stretch or double up on resources all you like. The scope has or has not been increased. You WILL need more money/resource and more time to do more work. Again, unless your one of those leaders who makes people want to work weekends on salary....;)

Well, I like to be fair and square with people, mean and lean. I totally understand what you've mentioned, but have you ever experienced schedule creep and you were able to recover 100% ?

Absolutely. Multiple Times. But this almost always came with the support of the sponsor rejecting scope, spinning a piece of the project off into a distinct project, and/or overtime. Ramping up resources has never worked in my experience. Unless they are already onboard resources....I'm talking fresh resources end up slowing things down.

How were you able to recover 100% when you used onboard resources and recorded additional MHRS and overtime. You did not end up over-budget ? I am assuming that these creeps where not taken into account in the risk contingency reserve.

The only way I could think of that would make you finish within budget is using the Management Reserve amounts. Did that ever happen ?

I think that once the "Schedule Creep" occurs what we have to do is not control it but apply the contingency plan. Schedule Creep should be identified as a potential risk in the earliest phases Project Life Cycle and design a contingency plan. In the worst case, you wouldn't have identified it as a risk, no contingency plan for the "Schedule Creep occurrence" would have been then designed. Reached this point the PM should review the "what if" scenarios and meet all the stakeholders to take a decision.

The key is not to prioritize what's on your schedule, but to schedule your priorities :). Just to add to what Steven said earlier - the 'If' is a 'When' AND 'HOW'. In the past we had severe issues regarding scope/ schedule creep, where even experienced PM's faced lot of flack for not managing it properly. There is very less that one can do to address the creep, it will happen. and if it happens how can we mitigate is what is required.
From a PMO aspect what we did was a 'Cause and Effect' Analysis on the various projects grouped by size to understand the possible causes of slippages. Once identified most of the issues we were able to address through proper process changes or new processes. For example one of the reason was 'Ambiguous requirements', we set up a Early consulting with the Sponsor and Customer in the early phase (Idea) to identify the and define clearly the requirements which also provided a Rough order of Magnitude of cost for the project

I think that once the "Schedule Creep" occurs what we have to do is not control it but apply the contingency plan. Schedule Creep should be identified as a potential risk in the earliest phases Project Life Cycle and design a contingency plan. In the worst case, you wouldn't have identified it as a risk, no contingency plan for the "Schedule Creep occurrence" would have been then designed. Reached this point the PM should review the "what if" scenarios and meet all the stakeholders to take a decision.