How to manage scope creep in project

I would like to share my views on how best we can manage scope in our projects. Before that let me define scope. I define scope as list of requirements for which you are expected to provide solutions. For an application development project, scope can be the list of business requirements, for an infrastructure project it can be the list of servers which you might need to provide support/upgrade, etc., Each item can be classified as High/Medium/Low in terms of priority/business criticality for the team to focus on high priority items.

Now, a never ending challenge for the project managers is scope change or scope creep. I would say that scope change is easier to manage as I think there would be a change control board who approves the change considering the impact in terms of solution, time, cost.

What I think is difficult to manage the scope creep i.e., business intentionly or unintentionly adds new items to the scope list but without any body else notice, and without additional cost or time impact.

As a project manager, one of the main duty is to manage the scope of the project. I can outline the basic steps in order to better manage the scope and to avoid any scope creep.

Organize the requirements.

• One of the critical task is to organize your requirements in a requirement register
• Get it agreed with the client
• Baseline it
• Check into VSS or any version management software.

Requirement traceability matrix (check the template here)

• All the requirements in the RTM should reference to the item in the checked in requirement register. For whichever you dont find any reference, it is either new or changed one.
• Communicate immediately to the client
• Validate why it got missed in the requirement register.
• Highlight if it is a change and immediately communicate it to change control board. After that change control process take place.

If you dont have the agreed requirement register in place, business/clients have the easier excuse to tell you that you have missed while requirement analysis/capture phase.

Better we organized ourselves better and save the project team from the scope creep.

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