| Seven Deadly Sins of... Project Management: LUST |
| By Michael Cooch |
Published
10/15/2007
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Risk Management
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Unrated
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Michael Cooch
Educated in New Zealand, Michael achieved an Honours Degree in Manufacturing and Industrial Technology. Since then he has gone on to achieve Project Management Professional (PMP), PRINCE2 Practitioner and a Diploma in Business Analysis (ISEB). He has worked at the leading edge of the programme/ portfolio/ project control industry for 9 years and has experience working with Accenture, Unilever, London Stock Exchange, NHS, Morgan Stanley, Orange, TYCO and the Office of Rail Regulation.
View all articles by Michael Cooch
What is lust in the project context?
In this article series I’m going to associate each deadly sin with some ‘project transgressions’ and then talk about an appropriate ‘penitence’ to ensure these sins are avoided in the future.
So lust (latin: luxuria) is defined as an ‘unrestrained desire without consideration of the consequences’. I see this sin as often starting at during project kick-off. The sponsor, and key stakeholders, have multiple, and often conflicting, scope requirements and they desire everything to be delivered as part of the project. More often than not a subset of the initial shopping list will be agreed and base-lined and the project will be initiated. Then as the project progresses new requirements will appear and previously excluded scope will suddenly appear back on the radar again. Then the battle of managing changing requirements and formally agreeing what is ‘in’ and what is ‘out’ becomes progressively more complex and the waters become muddier and muddier until the project has been ‘mortally wounded’ and finds itself in the unenviable position of facing the impossibility of delivering against the sponsor and stakeholder expectations.
So read the following descriptions and see whether these lustful project transgressions exist in your world:
- Scope creep / Lack of a commercial change control process – The requirement’s ‘goal posts’ are constantly moving. Scope is added on an ad-hoc basis in an uncontrolled fashion. Not everyone is apprised of the current baseline. No impact/benefit analysis is done before a change is added to the baseline;
- Gold-plating – You often deliver scope over and above what was initially ageed to either keep the client happy or try to ‘exceed their expectations’; and
- Unclear base-lined requirements / Too many changes occurring late in the project – There is too much room for interpretation in the originally agreed scope document and you find a lot of change seems to happen at the end of the project during build, testing and production.
If you read that list and found yourself nodding at each of those bullets then don’t worry as you’re not alone. Lack of Scope Management is cited as one of the key contributors to unsuccessful projects and certainly one of the most frequent sins. You are suffering from LUST! The unrestrained desire for additional functionality without consideration of the consequences!
In purgatory, the penitent walks within flames to purge himself of lustful thoughts...however for the purposes of this article we’ll focus less on the flames and more on a few pragmatic steps you can take to address these common transgressions. Let’s go through the appropriate penitence to free your project environment from lust, the first of our deadly sins....
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