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Progressive elobaration vs Scope creep

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Upendra Agnihotram Assistant Vice President| Barclays Shared Services Chennai, Tamilnadu, India
How can the project manager ensure that there is no scope creep happening while performing progressive elaboration? For example the customer might ask to build a wooden box for which the company agrees and creates a scope baseline. Later the customer might want to create shelves inside the box. From customer point of view the box is the scope boundary hence he is not asking something which is out of the scope. But from project point of view it requires additional effort to make them which was not agreed earlier.
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Darren Kosa Planning & Controls Contractor Hampshire, United Kingdom
Mar 15, 2016 9:37 AM
Replying to Upendra Agnihotram
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Hi All,

Thanks for the replies.

Hi Darren,

That is what my expectation is. I had a good argument with someone that once the scope is agreed between both parties..in the case of example where customer stated he needed a wooden box only and the requirements are signed, for what ever change there after I will follow the Change Management process without fail post my scope baseline is agreed between both parties.

But the other project manager told me that as a Customer he will not agree to pay more for the additional work (Shelves within the box) as he felt that it is covered in signed baseline.

Hope my assumption is valid
I think every PM has this challenge… client expectation vs. what is contracted against. More often than not their expectation is a Rolls Royce, but only want to pay out for a second-hand Morris Minor.

Are they able to identify the particular requirement that stated they wanted shelves in the box? If not and they still want shelves, are they willing to trade scope? They originally wanted a mahogany box, but now they’ll get a shelved plywood box with a mahogany veneer.

Before you start town the RfC route, how much will it cost your business to implement this change? Is there a chance that you can offset this cost if you were to get 10x more work from the same client?

If your requirements are ambiguous enough that they can be interpreted more than one way, then you could have a problem. If they are watertight, then you will have less of a problem. It all depends on how you want to manage this particular client.
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Bala S Duvvuri Project Manager| Shell Bangalore, Karnataka, India
imho may be you should have done more work on clearly understanding the requirement and getting the assumptions clarified.
You spoke to other project manager and he said that client may not agree to pay but give it a try to explain this scope change to the client and see what happens(but be careful to use the required soft skills)
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Patrick Dicey Manager, Customer Project Management| CentralSquare Technologies Orlando, Fl, United States
I think your specific question focuses on the proposal/scope documentation processes. If your customer was expecting shelves in their box and that was not a part of the bid/scope baseline your team put together, then the proposal/statement of work was probably not detailed enough to be clear to all parties involved. If it was, when they asked for shelves you would have something in writing to point to and help explain how they were excluded.

I work in a commercial environment with minimal pre-sale/contractual documentation and deal with this challenge everyday.

Good luck!

Patrick
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Stéphane Parent Self Employed / Semi-retired| Leader Maker Prince Edward Island, Canada
This often happens when there is ambiguity in your scope documents. When you hit a spot where you and the client disagree with the interpretation, you should explain to the client that you priced and scheduled the project based on your interpretation of the scope.

Hopefully, the client will understand your perspective and will agree the "missed requirement" as being new scope. If not, you better hope that your project is time and material.
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Ahmed Fouad Sedky Senior Claims Consultant | Systech Canada Toronto, Ontario, Canada
From my experience, the client usually sees the minor changes as part of the scope and try to link it to the original scope. Change control management process is the solution as mentioned above plus all this depends on how well the scope is defined in the contract. The more gray areas you have the more the tendency to have scope creep that can not be claimed as change to scope.
The attitude of employer (Being fare and responsible) will also impact the situation.
Refer to initial understanding and contract meeting in case the issues is not clearly defined in the contract.
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