The Missing Piece

Scope creep. Two words that we don’t want to deal with and yet we face every day in the midst of a project. What starts as a solid plan may get waylaid by seemingly good intentions that carry the finish line further and further away and which may have rippling effects on stakeholders and end users alike.

Fortunately, I’ve not dealt with a great deal of scope creep within the projects I’ve worked on or been a part of as a team member. I can say that one thing we focus on heavily within my company is ensuring deadlines and deliverable dates are feasible and realistic. The theme seems to be that if we think it can be done in 5 days, it’s better to say 7-8 and deliver early than deal with the aftermath of delivering late. Better to under promise and over deliver than overpromise and under deliver.

However, one project that I worked on experienced scope creep on a significant scale. We were set to deliver a project within about a two month time frame. Plans were created, SMEs consulted, budgets created, and work was underway. Somewhere in the midst of the project it was discovered that a large chunk of material was unaccounted for. This wasn’t internal material-it was an external resource and quite costly to obtain. Budgets were reworked and recalculated, but there was going to be significant increases to ensure this component would be available. In addition, the missing piece would also take an additional six weeks to obtain. You can only imagine the team’s horror at discovering that this was overlooked-but from an ordering standpoint of now needing an additional 6 weeks, but also in cost. To make matters worse, the missing piece had to be in place before making any additional progress on the other components.

To fast forward to the end of the story, the missing piece did take all of the full six weeks to be delivered, the project was over time budget now by seven weeks due to the delays. In addition, several thousand dollars were added to the budget. Stakeholders, especially those holding the purse strings, were not happy. End users were not happy as the wait impacted the results they were looking to achieve in the short term which then in turn impacted the long term. The members of the team were placed on hold for the six weeks and then needed to move frantically, working long hours at great cost to complete the project.

Looking back, this was a simple error. It was simply an oversight of the needed or missing component. Were it not a critical piece to the remainder of the project it wouldn’t have been a big deal in the long run. However, since it was a linchpin component, it meant that production was stopped and budgets inflated. It did teach me an incredibly valuable lesson. Account for all pieces. If you think you have them all, if you think you have all of the pieces to the puzzle-ask someone else to count them. Ensure you have a second and even third pair of eyes on the project before beginning, before promising, and certainly before delivering.