Scope Creep – HUH?

Throughout the duration of this course on Project Management, my classmates and I have heard and read much on scope creep, so the concept has become well-known to all of us.  I was talking earlier this week about this posting assignment, and a couple of my work colleagues were not familiar with the meaning of this concept, so to begin my posting, I thought it wise to describe it for those who are not in the course and happen to stumble upon this blog.

One definition of scope creep, and the one I will focus on for this posting, is that it is the natural tendency of the client, as well as project team members, to try to improve the project’s output as the project progresses (Portny, Mantel, Meredith, Shafer, Sutton, & Kramer, 2008, p. 350.).  This may seem reasonable – of course, the goal should be to have the best outcome possible - but when the project timeline, budget and resources have been determined in a project plan, scope creep can be quite disruptive and challenging.

I have been involved in several similar projects to onboard new clinics to our organization.  The project manager set up a plan and several meetings that involved what seemed to be all of the departments who would be part of the process:  accounting, marketing, purchasing, pharmacy, lab, human resources, IT, building management, courier, and education, to name a few.  Our first clinic was ready to roll!  One of the major pieces of the onboarding was to give the clinic staff the appropriate education and training for applications they would need to best serve their patients.  The scheduling and registration system was a component that might have been underestimated in this first onboarding experience.  The patient access team was not included in the initial meetings, and once the need was identified, the scope of the training was much more involved than what was initially planned. 

The good news is that the director and manager of patient access were brought into the discussion, and a change was made to the project plan.  This involved additional training for the clinic staff, and additional hours from the patient access trainers.  One of the challenges was that the already functioning clinic couldn’t close for more than on day for required training, so these additional sessions needed to happen outside of clinic hours.

One of the suggestions from Portny et al is to have a formal change control system process to introduce and accomplish these modifications with appropriate communication and resource use (2008, p. 346).  In the addition of training to the clinic scenario, I did not see a formal process utilized, and the project did go off track a bit.

The good news is that we all learned of this need in the first onboarding experience.  One of the factors which might decrease the risk of this occurring in future projects is the experience that happened in the first.  And, we did.  I would like to say that we have the process down to a science, but a good project manager knows there is always some scope creep when a project is underway.  The key is to anticipate the creep, and have a system in place to communicate any changes.

References: 

Portny, S. E., Mantel, S. J., Meredith, J. R., Shafer, S. M., Sutton, M. M., & Kramer, B. E. (2008). Project management: Planning, scheduling, and controlling projects. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.