Projects are a big part of the small business model. Whether they are projects to improve organizational efficiency or productivity or projects that are completed for customers, strong project management is extremely important. Scope creep happens when a project becomes less efficient because the demands of the project keep changing. In today’s blog, we will try to define scope creep and how to prevent it from being a problem for your business.

What is Scope Creep?

The easiest way to describe scope creep is to create a hypothetical project that everyone knows about. Making dinner. Say you have an idea of what you want to make for dinner and you invite people to come and eat. You purchase ingredients, but as you do you see a couple of other things that would go nicely with the meal you are creating. You get back a couple of hours before dinner is to be served and you set out on cooking.

Since you didn’t stick to the plan that you had when you went to the store to get groceries, you have spent more money than you already had planned and you didn’t factor in all the steps that you had to take to create, making the dinner much more difficult to pull off by the deadline (dinnertime!). Your ambition, as good as it is, has hamstrung you. While it isn’t impossible that you pull everything off, it is far less likely. You underestimated the scope of your endeavor and it made it more difficult to achieve the core goals. That is scope creep.

How to Avoid Scope Creep

Let’s briefly go through four things you can do to help you not bite off more than you can chew on your projects.

Identify Clear Project Scope

Start with a goal and then put together a well-thought-out scope that clearly outlines all objectives, deliverables, and timelines, down to specific tasks that have to be completed. All projects have to have some detailed documentation as well; a kind of reference for project collaborators to refer to so they know what is in and what is out of scope. 

Set Clear Expectations

You need to have clear and constant contact with stakeholders of the project, so they know exactly what the scope of the project is and how it is coming along. In the same vein, project managers should set down how they will manage the project and the times and frequency of communication. There should be an impact analysis completed before any changes are made to ensure that the project doesn’t go off the rails. 

Set and Meet Goals

For any project to work, project managers need to be able to clearly prioritize the critical goals of the project. You can add things, but they should be done after the core parts of the project are handled. If there is the matter of completing the “side missions” of the project—meaning add-ons or non-essential tasks—project managers should be flexible as long as the core parts of the project are being completed in a timely manner.

Regular Assessments 

Frequently reviewing where a project is, in terms of its completion, ensures that there are no work bottlenecks that could put the project in jeopardy. It also allows for timely updates to collaborators, a huge benefit for anyone that works under a deadline.

Project Management Tools Can Help

This is just a few things project managers and stakeholders should be aware of to help them avoid huge cost overruns and other negative impacts of scope creep. Fortunately for the modern project manager, there are massively useful project management tools out there that makes tracking progress, sharing files, and communicating much easier. 

If your projects keep failing, don’t hesitate to call the IT professionals at Dresner Group. We can help you get the tools you need to help you avoid projects slogging along or costing too much money. For more information and to have a conversation about your organization’s project management, give us a call today at (410) 531-6727.