Effective Software Project Management

Traditional Versus Adaptive Scope Change Management

You already know that scope change is the bane of the Traditional project manager. Every scope change request brings with it the work needed to generate the project impact statement as the deliverable from having processed the change request. This is non–value-added time. Depending on the extent of the scope change request, it can render many parts of the project plan obsolete or incorrect. The time and effort spent building those parts of the plan that are no longer relevant was time wasted. None of this is found in the Adaptive approaches.

You already know that scope change is the lifeblood of the Adaptive project manager. Scope change is a necessary ingredient for the Adaptive project team to converge on a successful solution that delivers maximum business value for the time and money invested. The frequency of scope change requests over the cycles can be a good bellwether for the effectiveness of the project. The frequency should increase at an increasing rate over consecutive early cycles, level off to a constant rate during the middle cycles, and finally increase at a decreasing rate over the later cycles. As the project nears completion, scope change requests should disappear. Any pattern significantly different from this one is a signal of problems. Too few scope change requests means that meaningful involvement is probably lacking. Too many scope change requests in later cycles is probably an indicator that the solution ...