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In my May and June 2005 columns ("Ten Signs of Pending Disaster"
and "Strategies for Averting Disaster," respectively), I talked
about the signs that portended a project's slide into failure and I
suggested ways to rescue these seemingly doomed projects. Among the
points I made were some thoughts about scope creep.
Typically, we think of scope creep as a product of the customer's desires
(usually to get something more for nothing more), but we practitioners
often inflict scope creep on ourselves.
The Request
Recently, a customer approached my team with the request to build a
demonstration of a user interface concept and to have it ready in exactly
four weeks from the request date.
With those as our only requirements, we proceeded to consider what
options we had that would fulfill the customer's request. After a brief
discussion, we knew there were only three ways to go:
- An interactive PowerPoint demo
- A canned, mini application
- An interactive runtime prototype
Given the tight time frame, we decided to inform the customer that
we would prepare an interactive PowerPoint demo to showcase our proposed
user interface.
The Plan
The plan was to meet with the customer's engineering representative
and tell him how we were going to proceed. We would then describe the
other two options we had considered, explain why we had rejected them
as viable choices, and then close by gaining his buy-in on our plan.
A very traditional sandwich approach to what is essentially a sales
pitch. Easy breezy.
D'OH!
Even though the customer's representative jump-started our discussion
by disclosing that his team and their stakeholders would be satisfied
with a PowerPoint presentation of our proposed solution, our team felt
compelled to doom our own project--to impose scope creep on ourselves
with no help from the customer.
Even as the customer's engineering representative was assuring us that
a slide show would do the trick, we were already through the launch
cycle on the merits of a fully functional, runtime demo of the interface.
We waxed poetic about how we would pull real data from key databases
and how we'd emulate geospatial data so we could provide the customer
with an end-to-end simulation of a fully functional scenario.
Difficult? Sure. But man-oh-man, it would be a rockin' hot demo!
Oh! Did I mention that during our initial decision-making process we
did a cost analysis of our three options and determined that the best-case
outcome for each alternative was 3 weeks, 7 weeks, and 12 weeks for
each of the options we had on the table? Remember: We had only 4 weeks
to get 'er done in the first place.
What Were We Thinking?
I'd ask what the heck were we thinking during our meeting, but that
begs a fact that clearly was not in evidence at that time.
Here's what I think happened to us in spite of our plan to pitch and
successfully sell our willing customer on the fleetest, most agile option
we had available:
We are, by training and by wiring, user-centric professionals. It's
hard for us to scale back our visions for our customers and our end-users.
We want to deliver to them what we know they need in order to be successful,
not just what they want.
Given these tendencies, it's a surprise we aren't missing more toes
from shooting ourselves in the foot all the time.
At the end of the day, we did finally come to our senses, but not before
we promised the by-then very skeptical engineer the most complex solution.
He was quite gracious when we called later and explained our temporary
insanity. He was equally gracious when it came time for him to reconfirm
that a modest, but interactive, PowerPoint slide show would satisfy
his team's needs for the demo. Whew!
Scope Creep--Have You Caused It?
Either the buying or selling party can cause scope creep. Often, we
as sellers aren't even aware that we've just sold ourselves down the
river, or that we've played a part in scope creep that may have been
initiated outside of our group.
So, when you notice that scope creep is happening, take a minute to
review what promises--explicit and implied--you've made to your customer.
You may find that in your zeal to provide the best product possible,
you've allowed the content, the deliverable, and/or the implementation
model to grow well beyond the bounds of the timing, funding, and/or
staffing scope that you've based your project plan (and pricing!) on.
Do you have a topic you'd like to see discussed in this column?
Send me an e-mail at thinking@dghenterprise.com.
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