Kill Scope Creep: How To Manage Project Change Requests

Editor's Note: In the second part of this two-part series, Kless examines the elements of good change request documents. Read part one of this series on RainToday.com to see how change request documents work with scope documents to protect your project from scope creep.

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In the first part of this series, I discussed how many small and medium firms do not suffer from scope creep at all, but rather from the lack of a scope document. However, if, in fact, you do have a valid scope document, the major cause of scope creep is the lack of enforcement of the change request process. It is the job of the project manager to enforce this process to avoid scope creep.

Please note that the language that I use for these is change request, not change order. Therefore, these are, by definition, requests and may be accepted or rejected by the project sponsor (or steering committee, on a larger project). A change request is simply an acknowledgment that something that affects the scope needs an adjustment.