Here is my takeaway #32 from one of the most useful practical books in my field, “Project Management for the Unofficial Project Manager”:
32) “You need a change process, so when people come to you and say, ‘Hey, wouldn’t this be good if we could just add this?’ you’ll have a system to help you decide if it will be good.”
Note: This comes from Chapter 6 “Monitoring and Controlling the Project: Keep Your Sanity or Lose Your Mind?” (pages 176)
You definitely don’t want “gold plating” to creep into your projects, but I agree with this book that new information that changes the way you would have written original documentation had you known it to begin with, can and should change the Scope of your project. Make sure you have a change process so the group can vet what changes are necessary or not, considering all other factors and constraints of the project. Scrap the project and start over if you must, if the implications are severe enough that you would be better off going in a new direction.
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STORY TIME:
One Scope Discovery we had on a database project, was the need for safety and environmental compliance documented in a certain way. It wasn’t that we weren’t aware of compliance standards, but compliance requirements change from country to country from time to time and usually more and more compliance reporting expectations that are voluntary becomes mandatory. Our team decided to add significant compliance additions to our data builds, increasing the project’s output by 130%.
Our Change Board added a compliance officer to our team to handle the more urgent safety compliance matters. I added tons of environmental compliance documentation at the component level of tiny parts on an electrical board. And our Team Lead added hours into project work to build out a handy mapping of all the compliance requirements by location.
In this instance, we were not just adding cosmetic work to the database without dedicating more resources just to make it look pretty, but we were expanding the project to meet necessary changes in requirements. It made our whole deliverable that much more important and extending the time expectations for the overall project more reasonable.
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Here’s how a search on Bing described Scope Discovery:
Scope discovery is the process of identifying and defining a product’s features, functionality, and requirements based on user needs and startup goals. It can also refer to additions to a project scope that enhance rather than harm the project.
So, there you have it, this is one good reason your Change Board might approve significant changes in the middle of your project. Change Management and Project Management go hand in hand. The next book takeaways will come from a Change Management book. Stay tuned!