Was the discovery of Viagra an example of scope creep, scope change or opportunity?

Organizational Project Management Scope Management

Eduard Hernandez

Community Champion

Product Operations Program Manager Barcelona, Cataluña, Spain

Background

Even the fastest selling drug of all time, Viagra, is not used for what it was originally intended. It started life as plain old UK92480, a new treatment for angina, a heart condition that constricts the vessels that supply the heart with blood.

The drug company Pfizer was looking for something that would relax these blood vessels, however its trials in people were disappointing. Pfizer were about to abandon further trials when the trial volunteers started coming back and reporting an unusual side effect - lots of erections.

Average worldwide revenue of Pfizer's Viagra from 2003 to 2016 is 1.750 milion dollars.

Posted: May 15, 2017 7:38 AM

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Cris Casey Managing Director| Exertus, Inc.

This was neither scope creep nor scope change. This looks like re-purposing of a drug that had already been developed. If they did not change the formulation, then there would be no need to change the scope of the original project; the objective yes, but not the scope.

Posted: Jul 10, 2017 1:58 PM

Cris Casey Managing Director| Exertus, Inc.

Jul 07, 2017 10:16 PM

Replying to Vincent Guerard

...

Was it like 3M post-it? An opportunity found for an otherwise useless product!

Vincent - my understanding of the Post-It product was that the adhesives engineer was actually looking for a non-permanent way to attach notes to his church hymn book and "stumbled" on the right formula.

Posted: Jul 10, 2017 2:01 PM

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Was the discovery of Viagra an example of scope creep, scope change or opportunity?

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