Question 11.8 Case Study

Read the case study Child Support Software a Victim of Scope Creep and answer the following questions.

What do you think are the real problems with this project?

Refer to Control Scope (see Week 11 lecture). Which of Hartleys (2009) techniques could be applied to manage the scope creep on this project

Case Study

Child Support Software a Victim of Scope Creep

In March 2003, the United Kingdoms Child Support Agency (CSA) started using their new $860 million software system for receiving and disbursing child support payments. However, by the end of 2004 only about 12% of all applications had received payments, and even those took about three times longer than normal to process. CSA thus threatened to scrap the entire system and withhold $2 million per month in service payments to the software vendor. The problem was thought to be due to both scope creep and the lack of risk management strategy.

The vendor claimed that the project was disrupted constantly by CSAs 2500 change requests, while CSA maintained there were only 50, but the contract did not include a scope management plan to help define what constituted a scope change request. And the lack of a risk management strategy results in no contingency or fall back plans in case of trouble, so when project delays surfaced and inadequate training became apparent, there was no way to recover.

(Meredith & Mantel, 2009, p. 244)

References

Nutting, J., & White, G. (1993). The business of communicating. Roseville, NSW: McGraw Hill.

Robbins, S. P., Millett, B., Cacioppe, R., & Waters-Marsh, T. (1998). Organisational behaviour - Leading and managing in Australia and New Zealand (2nd ed.). Sydney: Prentice Hall.

Scannell, M. (2010). The big book of conflict resolution games. Sydney: McGraw Hill