Implementing these best practices will help your team get paid for their work and keep your project within budget and on schedule.
As many of us know, scope creep occurs when project requirements grow beyond the scope of work that was agreed upon initially. Scope creep eats away at a project’s profit margin, but also can lead to delays and lower project quality.
Some of the common causes of rework and scope creep include:
- A project designers’ desire for perfection
- Review comments from the city or manager beyond what was expected
- Value engineering after schematic design
- Changes in the clients’ needs or desires
- Design errors and omissions
These all result in unplanned and uncompensated work, possibly sending the project behind schedule and over budget.
Many firms do not collect the money for their additional work because they either fail to ask for a change order, ask too late (after the work is performed), or have poor documentation to back up a change order request. Project managers also may be trying to keep the client happy or may be attempting to avoid any conflict.
Here’s a guide to help effectively manage scope creep at your firm:
- Clearly design your project scope of work. The proposal/contract needs to explicitly lay out your scope of work as well as any design items that are excluded. Without enough detail in the proposal, there is not enough evidence to explain that the new scope was not already included in the original contract.
- Communicate with the client. Ensure the client understands that change happens often and ask how they will handle changes in scope, requirements, deliverables, schedules, unforeseen field conditions, or staff. Agree how to handle changes that will require additional fees. Ask the client to set up a project change contingency account in their budget. Keep the client informed on project progress, potential issues, and all changes.
- Establish a system for tracking all changes. Keep track of all changes to the project scope: when the change was initiated, by whom, and the associated cost and time impacts. Have a project change log and keep meeting minutes when a client requests a change. Sometimes the cost may be listed as $0, but the client should still see that a change occurred.
- Send project milestones to the client. Design development drawings and progress construction drawings should be reviewed by the client. It is easier to track changes once they have had a chance to comment on a previous set of drawings.
- Send change orders to the client. Have an easy change order form that addresses the cost impact, time impact, and description of the changes. Regardless of your contract type and if you are on budget or not, you should still request compensation for your scope changes.
- Avoid too many meetings. There is a difference between good client communication and wasting time by having an abundance of meetings. If you continually work with a client who wants to have too many meetings, or the meetings last for more than an hour at a time, it may be worth adding an agreed upon number of meetings into your contract.
- Educate your employees. Make sure that your project team understands the importance of scope management and is familiar with your firm’s change management process. Train your team members to recognize the signs of scope creep and know how to handle changes appropriately. The team members also need to know what is in the original scope to avoid performing services that were not in the proposal.
Managing scope creep effectively is critical to the success of projects. When managed properly, there is a silver lining of scope creep. Changes to the scope of work have the potential for more revenue and sales without needing to rewrite contract terms and conditions that were already agreed upon. There are no additional marketing costs, and no competition when sending a design change order.
Implementing these best practices will help your team get paid for their work and keep your project within budget and on schedule.
Stephen Dominguez, P.E., S.E. is principal-in-charge of structural engineering at WT Group. Connect with him on LinkedIn.
