Scope creep is a dreaded thing that can happen on any project, wasting money, decreasing satisfaction, and causing the expected project value to not be met (Larson & Larson, 2009). In this blog, I will discuss a project in which I experienced issues related to scope creep.
Recently, I took on a home improvement project with my aunt
in helping her to re-paint her home office. A project that was originally planned
for three days took two-weeks to complete. We first wrote out a plan in which
day one, we would go out to shop for paint, day two, we would begin to paint
the room and day three, we would paint the ceiling. We were on track with our
plan until we later realized that painting over a dark colored (red) wall with
lighter paint was a challenge.
After buying the desired colored paint and painting half of
the office, we noticed that the dark color was peeking through the new color.
Well, we knew that this wouldn’t be ideal, so we stopped and spent the next few
days researching and reconstructing our plan.
Our new plan consisted of spending one day prepping and
priming the walls good. As first-time painters, silly of us to have thought that
we can buy paint and paint a wall. It wasn’t that simple as we missed two
important steps (prepping and priming). After, we spent two days painting and
we were able to successfully complete the home office. What a long two weeks!
This scope of this project was not clearly defined, and the
expected timeline was altered due to poor goal setting. If a project skips
detailed decomposition and requirements analysis, the scope of the project
remains ambiguous (Larson & Larson, 2009). Because my aunt and I had no
experience with painting, we were unaware of the steps and materials needed to
effectively paint a wall. A work-break down structure (WBS) should have been
created as a guide for this project. With this being so, trial and error allowed
us to later sit down to reconstruct our plan.
Scope creep is sometimes unavoidable due to unforeseen occurrences.
When scope creep happens, the project manager must work to protect the baseline
of the project and define the scope change. Looking back on this project, I
could have given myself time to research and educate myself on how to
effectively paint a room, the materials I would need and the cost, and an
accurate estimated time needed to complete the project. Abramovici (2000)
stated that, no matter how well organized a project is, uncontrolled scope
creep can break it. It is the project manager's responsibility to avoid scope
creep or manage the implementation of the new scope into the project in the
best possible manner.
Abramovici, A. (2000). Controlling scope creep. PM
Network, 14(1), 44–48.
