Scope change can be defined as the alteration to a project
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Nov 24, 2024
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Scope change can be defined as the alteration to a project's scope
which entails any type of change that is made from the original contract with a client (Graham et al., 2020). Personally, I have experienced a scope change in a project that I was working on. There was a time I was doing an internship in an IT firm and we were tasked with developing a website that would enable the firm to interact with customers better. Although the whole plan had already been laid out before we started the project, an additional feature which was a chatbot that would answer common knowledge questions was added to the project. This scope change increased the budget of the project and the deadline for delivering the project had to be increased by 5 days.
Every project should begin with agreed-upon project requirements, including a project timeline,
budget, boundaries, and incremental and final deliverables. When a project’s requirements go beyond those included in the original plans without authorization or control measures, the project enters scope creep (Graham et al., 2020). An example of a big project which experienced
scope creep was the Denver International Airport’s (DIA) automated baggage-handling system which finished over a year late and $569 millions over budget. Ultimately, the airport had to revert to a manual labor system and abandon the project altogether hence leading to loss of resources such as money and valuable time (Rudder, 2022).
Gold plating occurs when a project manager or team member believes that a project could be enhanced by an additional feature and includes it without approval or discussion with the client (Graham et al., 2020). An example of gold plating is when my friend’s IT company was contracted to develop a desktop application for a company. However, as a bonus, they went ahead and created a mobile app. However, after some time, this mobile app started developing technicalities and the IT company must solve these issues for free to avoid losing a crucial client.
Planning is one of the major ways through which scope change, creep and gold plating can be avoided in projects. Planning entails defining a project's requirements before project initiation, ensuring all stakeholders agree on these requirements, clearly communicating the scope creep risks, creating a clear scope creep management plan and training stakeholders to execute this control plan (Hobbs & Petit, 2017).
References
Graham, N., Portny, S. E., Layton, M., Morrow, D., Ostermiller, S. J., Rose, D., & Dionisio, C. S. (2020). Project Management All-in-one
. John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Hobbs, B., & Petit, Y. (2017). Agile methods on large projects in large organizations. Project Management Journal
, 48
(3), 3–19. https://doi.org/10.1177/875697281704800301
Rudder, A. (2022, August 26). Scope creep: Definition, examples & how to prevent it
. Forbes. https://www.forbes.com/advisor/business/scope-creep/
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