Creative strategies for changing project scope

PROJECT MANAGEMENT

Have you ever had an experience on a project where your sponsor became a little edgy when scope changes were raised? Nine times out of 10, this edginess is caused by the budget constraints they are forced to work within.

One project springs to mind for me. It was a large system delivery project for which a senior project manager from our Melbourne, Australia office was the project director. Here's her story as she related it to me a few weeks ago:

The firm (as the contract supplier) was commissioned to build and implement a new driver licensing system for a government client - all under a fixed price arrangement. The CEO of the client's organization had issued a decree to the project sponsor: There will be no scope changes on this contract. This was something he could control, because he retained sign-off authority on contract variations.

That left the project sponsor in an awkward situation. On the one hand, she valued her job. On the other hand, she wanted to make sure the system that was implemented was as beneficial to the user community as possible.

What we put in place to help her through this dilemma was a mechanism that was founded on the basic truth known to all project managers: System requirements change. Certainly we all know how easy it is for new requirements to bubble to the surface once users start getting involved in the detailed analysis and design of a new system. Equally, we realized we should be capitalizing on this newly acquired knowledge to actively promote the identification of requirements that would naturally sink to the bottom. In other words, we needed a process that dealt with both the positives and the negatives.

In terms of new system developments, the passage of time is a key element in determining how accurate the requirement specification matches the reality of what is actually needed. On this particular project, there was a considerable period of time between when the requirements were originally documented and agreed upon to when the actual construction and delivery of the system commenced. During this period, the business needs had evolved, but not the documented system requirements. Unfortunately, the system's budget was tied to the requirements as originally documented.

Therefore, to ensure we came up with an efficient system while staying within the CEO's budget, we required a formal mechanism whereby functionality could be recycled and re-prioritized. Items that were deemed to have little benefit had to be sacrificed to make way for missed items that were deemed to have greater value.

To manage this approach to scope management, we employed a simple register of potential variations. Entries on this register were either items of positive (scope additions) or negative (scope reductions). Each was assessed and quantified and eventually a "bundie" of entries was submitted for CEO approval. Given the CEO's mandate that there be no variations on this contract, the "bundle" was of course chosen to have a net cost as close to zero as possible.

As with any estimate of work for a potential change, we needed to make it clear to the client the date by which a decision on the change had to be made. We couldn't have the client agreeing to remove a potential "negative" from scope after it was all but built. The later a decision to remove negative items of scope was made the smaller the saving to the client. The ideal decision time for negative items was prior to any effort being expended.

What was the contract supplier's view of this approach? Favourable. Even though the potential was there for revenue earning work to be removed from the contract, it reduced the risk of delivery. There were a number of items that were considered high risk, which generally implies high cost. The removal of high risk/high cost items meant the client could buy a number of positive items from the shopping list.

Jean Labelle, PhIP, is Ike director of the Project Management Core Competency Centre for DMR Consulting Group Inc. in Montreal. Jean cae be at 613-2286832 or jean_labette@dmrca.

Copyright Plesman Publications Ltd. Aug 2000
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