Question & Answer: Class, What is "Scope Creep"? What are some common causes of "Scope Creep" on projects?…

Expert Answer

In a project management, Scope creep commonly refers to continuously increasing growth in the scope of the project which is beyond the scope of control of the project manager or project leader. In such a situation, the originally defined goals will expand during the course of the project progress leading to project overruns in terms of time, costs and resources. It will subtly creep into the project through small adjustments in the scope and end up in stretching the projects timeline ultimately leading to even project failure in some cases.

This major cause for this Scope creep is due to poorly defined or documented project scope during the ideation or conceptualization stage of the project. Thus, it is very essential to clearly define the project scope with task owner associated to each of the goals at the start of the project itself. This concept is also known as function creep or feature creep in business setting.