|
|
|
|
Each month, Tom Mochal, President of TenStep, Inc. presents project management tips and techniques for planning and managing a project. TenStep, Inc. has a comprehensive, scalable project management process called TenStep (www.TenStep.com), as well as a project lifecycle process called LifecycleStep (www.LifecycleStep.com). Tom has also published a popular book called Lessons in Project Management that can be purchased at www.TenStep.com. Pipeline readers receive 20% off any TenStep or LifecycleStep purchase by entering the coupon code of "Pipeline" in their purchase.
You have all heard the mantra of scope change management – make sure that all scope change requests get approved by the sponsor (or sponsor designee). This should be obvious for large scope change requests. However, it is not always practical to gain individual approval for every five, ten or twenty hour scope change request. However, you definitely need to have a way to capture and manage these requests. If you don’t, you will quickly find that you are dealing with the infamous “scope creep”. There are three techniques to employ for managing small scope changes.
Batching Small Requests
It is hard to get the sponsor's attention for these small requests. It is a better use of time to batch the small changes up into a bundle. This means that you keep track of the small scope changes, their business value and their impact on the project. Then, when they hit a certain threshold, you take all of them all to the sponsor for approval. Instead of visiting the sponsor ten times for small scope changes, you batch them all together and see the sponsor one time. At that meeting you and the client discuss all the proposed changes (or perhaps just the larger ones in the batch) and get sponsor feedback on whether they should be done.
Project Manager Discretion
From a practical standpoint, it usually makes sense for the project manager and client manager to be given discretion to approve small scope change requests under some threshold of effort hours and cost. However, this assumes that the project is on or ahead of schedule, and that the changes do not make the project exceed the agreed upon cost or duration. If the project is in any risk of not meeting its cost or duration commitments, this discretion should not be used - even for a one-hour change request.
Scope Change Contingency Budget
In some organizations it is common to allocate a scope change contingency budget to handle small changes. Your organization may recognize that some scope changes are always requested and you may be allowed to allocate a percentage of the total project budget to account for these. For example, you may have a 5% contingency added to your budget to handle normal scope change requests. The scope contingency budget is usually designated for small scope change requests. The client must manage the scope change contingency budget. If the client uses the budget up early on small scope changes, there is nothing left for later change requests. This puts the client in a position of rationing the changes to ensure that only the most important changes are approved.
All projects need to manage scope effectively, which means having the sponsor make scope change decisions. However, it may not make sense to go to the sponsor for every small scope change. Instead, use one or more of these three options for managing these small changes in a flexible and reasonable manner.
Would you like to receive project management tips every week? Sign up for the weekly TenStep Project Management Tip of the Week at www.TenStep.com. Read about Tom’s new book, Lessons in People Management, at www.tenstepstore.com/detail/2.14LessonsinPeopleMgmt.html.
