Everyday Scope Creep

For this week's assignment, we had to identify a project in which scope creep took place. I have to admit that I'm a little late in posting this because I couldn't think of a situation in which scope creep actually happened to me personally, or a team that I was on. So, I will talk about a kind of "scope creep" that I have witnessed. By the way, for those reading this that aren't in my Walden classes, "scope creep" is what happens when you are working on a project and the scope is either ill-defined or not strictly followed, and the amount of work or nature of work starts to increase and/or change in unexpected ways as a result.

The first example I can think of is a project where the scope is well-articulated but ill-conceived. I was able to come up with this example after reading my friend David Smith's blog post on his home project adventures. I remember an example from when I was young where my grandparents wanted to flatten a side of a hilly patch on their one acre back yard with my mom and I. The hilly patch was about seven to ten feet high, about seven feet wide, and thirty feet long. The plan was to rent a rototiller and manually churn the hill, then shove the mud into wheelbarrows and dump them on some exposed tree roots in the back of the yard. So we had a plan and knew what everyone would be doing. However, the work was backbreaking and grueling. The mud was hard clay and packed in earth, and it wasn't long before the earth was very rocky, and the rototiller was having a tough time getting through the earth. After a very long day-and-a-half of work. At one point, my mom said that she thought this had gone too far, and that she thought the job would be better done with an earth mover, such as a Caterpillar. Grandma disagreed with that idea, perhaps because she already felt committed to making the original plan work. Eventually, she relented and a professional earth mover came out to look at the job. He said it would only take him an hour to finish it, and by the way, the clay we were throwing on the tree roots were going to kill the tree. So it was a good thing we called him. Sometimes the scope can seem just right when in fact the scope was poorly designed to begin with. A little more analysis on the front-end might have made us all realize that the job was too big for us and what we had planned.

My second example is what I'll call "association/affiliation/partnership scope creep. This is when a company is partnered with another company, often a customer/client of some kind, in which the nature of benefits and perks of being a "number one customer" or highly valued customer, are not clearly defined, and the customer keeps nibbling and slowly creeping and ratcheting up the demands on the service-providing company. I've seen the companies in the "number one" spot dictate all kinds of terms to the service providing companies I've worked for, to the point that the service-providing company is making special exceptions to company policy, forcing employees to undergo several extra-invasive security protocols to make the client comfortable, bumping the client to the first in queue for service over several other customers, and pretty much whatever else the customer demands. This seems like the company-equivalent of codependency or unhealthy boundaries, and it can have devastating consequences for both companies: One company ends up bending over backwards and compromising it's standards and corporate identity to appease the customer, and the client develops unrealistic expectations and gets frustrated with the service provider when these expectations are not met. If the associate were looked at like a special type of project, you could create a statement of work for the special customer, and spell out all of the specific benefits the special status or partnership affords them, and also what the limits are--the deal-breaking things the service-providing company cannot or will not do, so don't ask. Agree to certain perks and then stick to them! If the client company wants (or demands) more, then that would require a new contract or statement of work, and both parties would have to agree to the new written terms. The service providing company retains it's identity and stabilizes its work load, and the client is happy because they know what to expect and they're getting it, and they still have a "special status" with the service company.

So those are my examples of "scope creep." They may not be dead on the money, but it at least hits on some scope creep elements...

Thanks for reading!