Title: Scope Control: Tools, Insights, and Better Practices

Event: Portland General Electric, Professional Development Training

Date: October 26th, 2016

Speaker: Christopher Dennis

Summary:

Got stakeholders who are “bought in” but leave you feeling nervous? Worried that the project you’re leading won’t be recognizable as the project you started? Want your teams to handle new ideas and ongoing suggestions transparently? Hungry for techniques that halt the erosion of your project’s promises?

It’s reasonable to want the project we finish to feel like the project we started. And it’s reasonable for our projects to make appropriate adaptations. This course increases our chances of achieving a successful balance of stability and change. How? By focusing the project players on ways of work that surface both technical and human truth. 

Using experiences from our fortunate and unfortunate projects, we will learn to ask better questions and listen more carefully in a project’s fuzzy front end. We’ll get better at sniffing out the risks of shiftiness. Next we’ll explore the mechanisms of scope creep and highlight methods to address those mechanisms. We’ll also explore the social dynamics that make teams more or less effective at regulating their project’s scope.

Throughout this session, we will learn to validate requirements that stakeholders really care about, assess and forge consensus, listen for stakeholder drift, surface change requests, communicate the impact of change, and model behavior that respects agreements.