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SCOPE CREEP
BY DOMINIC THOMPSON

Scope Creep is the tendency for a project scope to grow continually (Schwalbe, 2012). It can also be considered as an aspect of change control that focuses on the insidious growth in the scale of a system during life cycle of a project (Coloy Consulting, n. d.). A further definition infers Scope Creep as uncontrolled changes or continuous growth in the scope of a project (Wikipedia, n. d.). Many proponents believe that Scope Creep is a result of poor requirement elicitation and evolving requirements may proliferate into Scope Creep. Scope Creep has the tendency of resulting in poor change control, cost overrun, poor communication, poor requirement allocation, weak management, and over-lack of project versatility (Dominic, 2014; Wikipedia, n. d.).
Case
I once worked on a bespoke ERP-Like application for a company that specializes in selling GSM electronic PINS to retailers. They were selling PINS of all the major telecom service providers in my country. They had a customer base of more than 300 retailers with average daily sales of $45,000. The entire system was manually driven, and all records were documented on a notebook. We were invited to evaluate the organization’s business process and automate the sales process.
The initial scope of the project was to create a distributed application that automates the sales process. It was basically a simple ordering system that works within the company. Based on the challenges we encountered, we decided to use RAD process model.
However, at each stage of functional delivery, the project owners decided to increase their requirement and restructure their business process. The functional demands of the application continually changed and its complexity grew.
Based on these changes, it was hard to achieve the initially stated deadline; there were drastic changes on the budget and

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