June 19, 2007

  • You CREEP!

    Scope Creep is the term that has come to mean any change in the project that was not in the original plan.  Change is constant.  To expect otherwise is simply unrealistic.  Changes occur for several reasons that have nothing to do with the ability or foresight of the customer or the project manager.  Market conditions are dynamic.  The competition can introduce or announce an upcoming new version of its product.  Your management might decide that getting to the market before the competition is necessary.  Your job as project manager is to figure out how these changes can be accommodated.  Tough job, but somebody has to do it!  Regardless of how the scope change occurs, it is your job as project manager to figure out how, if at all, you can accommodate the change.

    Hope Creep is the result of a project team memeber's getting behind schedule, reporting that he or she is on schedule, but hoping to get back on schedule by the next report date.  Hope creep is a real problem for the project manager.  There will be several activity managers within your project, team members who manage a hunk of work.  They do not want to give you bad news, so they are prone to tell you that their work is proceeding according to schedule when, in fact, it is not.  It is their hope that they will catch up by the next report period, so they mislead you into thinking that they are on schedule.  The activity managers hope that they will catch up by completing some work ahead of schedule to make up the slippage.  The project manager must be able to verify the accuracy of the status reports received from the team members.  This does not mean that the project manager has to check into the details of every status report.  Random checks can be used effectively.

    Effort Creep is the result of the team member's working but not making progress proportinate to the work expended.  Every one of us has worked on a project that always seems to be 95 percent complete no matter how much effort is expended to complete it.  Each week the status report records progress, but the amount of work remaining doesn't seem to decrease proportionately.  Other than random checks, the only effective thing that the project manager can do is to increase the frequency of status reporting by those team members who seem to suffer from effort creep.

    Feature Creep results when the team members arbitrarily add features and functions to the deliverable that they think the customer would want to have.  The problem is that the customer didn't specify the feature, probably for good reason.  If the team member has strong feeling about the need for this new feature, formal change management procedures can be employed.

    got it from Effective Project Management by Robert K. Whysocki.
    i'm definitely feature creep.....
    which one are you?