Question

Describe what “scope creep” is and how can it be avoided? Who is typically the person that causes you grief on adding features?

Explain in detail the Critical Path with the help of an example and demonstrate the two ways of speeding up the schedule while defining the term “Crashing”.

Answer 1

Scope creep can be defined as the changes brought to the scope of a given project which has the potential to cause a number of issues for the project due to unforeseeable changes, confusion, the necessity to change the associated values and revolution of a number of different critical decisions.

Scope creep usually happens when the company has not planned the processes of the project as good as they should have and therefore, a change might be needed to be brought in order to create the understanding which would, in theory, be better for the project but, in reality, can cause issues.

When the project manager makes any change to the scope of the project, the most radical changes come to the schedule and resource allocation and therefore, the line managers feel the most pressure due to these changes, that is the position I currently work at.

CPM or critical path method can be used to determine the critical activities of the project. We can say that the critical path is the path which is linear and where all the activities have a slack time of 0, delaying which would cause the entire project to be delayed and therefore, are considered to be one of the most important aspects in a project. With a CPM analysis, we can take into account activities that are critical to the project and activities which would have no net changes if they are slacks or crashed and therefore, make use of time and cost tradeoffs in order to complete the project with the required level of service and within the time contains.

They two ways of crashing a project can be considered to be considered to be adding of more resources as well as reducing the scope in order to be able to complete the project within the required time constraints.

We, therefore, define crashing as a tradeoff of adding/removing associated factors in order to complete the project with the best possible time and cost factors.