Scope Creep- the silent deadline killer (with bonus podcast!)

Hate Reading? Listen to the podcast:




The new year has been kind to my team. We have been fortunate to earn a number of new customers in the past month or so, including one of the country's most prestigious universities and a major energy resources company. As we are implementing these projects and working with their organizations, I thought it worthwhile to share with you some of my observations on scoping capture projects and issues surrounding change management.

Specifically, let's talk about how to avoid scope creep. Sometimes I call it "the creep," but generally it is defined as uncontrollable changes in the scope of a project. With a few strategies, you can avoid "the creep" and roll out an outstanding capture project. Other times, you just crash and burn. So good luck!

1. Make your project an elephant that needs to be eaten one bite at a time. I regularly kick off meetings with a picture of a giant elephant—and not just because I think they are awesome. So, when trying to choke down such a monstrous mammal, do you attack it from all sides by throwing expensive tools at it? Do you hire outside help? No, you don't. You take one small bite at a time. One of the best ways to minimize scope creep is to break your project down into distinct steps with dates. For example, by June 1st, we will have created five electronic forms and have them integrated into SharePoint. Simple goals produce great results.
2. Communication! One of my friends told me recently that "projects fail because of people, not because of technology." Having a plan for communication, assigning roles and responsibilities, and finding project champions all helps put the "people" back into large technology projects. All of my customers have my personal phone numbers, know my dog's name and can tell you my favorite color. (It's probably time to turn off the 24-hour Dan Cam though. It's getting to be a bit much.) I try to learn as much about them as well, because having a personal relationship is key to fostering a great communication environment for your project.
3. Have a change management plan. If you fail to plan, you plan to fail. (Holy cliche Batman!) All capture projects inevitably have changes and refinement in their scope and purpose. As vendors and customers, you need to allocate time and resources for unknown challenges. I encourage people I work with to add in extra room for items and issues that are unplanned. Like flare-ups of my YouTube addiction.
4. Listen to your team members. One of my tricks is holding short status meetings with people to show them what we've been up to. People greatly appreciate being kept in the loop and having a change to voice their opinions. Some of the best information you will gather will come from short, informal conversations. If your project team is distributed, consider tools like instant messaging, Twitter, or a service like Campfire to keep people up to date with the project.

So community, do you also loathe "the creep" and eat elephants? What is YOUR story? And is it on YouTube?

Making the business case internally for ECM and ERM

How do you make the business case for implementing an ECM or ERM system? As an electronic forms and document automation focused company, we often see ourselves as an on-ramp that connects to the highway of many other systems, so we’ve had a chance to observe the process and see what works and what doesn’t work. Here are some of our suggestions based on what a particular organization is facing.  You can follow the discussion at http://goo.gl/4SnK7 . Since LincDoc doesn’t exist in a vacuum, we wanted to share this with our VARs and customers who might face similar problems.

The Customer Situation: We’ve outgrown shared folders and need to be more efficient

• Engineering firm in the UK with 50 employees
• Over 500,000 files are in a shared drive without a formal structure.
• No retention schedules
• No user control, anyone can move and delete anything
• Looking for a quick fix, not considering a long term plan and strategy.

Their Questions, our advice (paraphrased):

1) Should we stop and create a plan, take an inventory, and do things right? Or just try to go with a quick fix?

It will work, but first you have to stop the bleeding. Luckily it is only 50 or so users, so you can train them easily on the new processes and new systems. Our advice would be to lock that volume as read only once you get a new system.

2) What are some tangible outcomes from the inventory process – such as typical documents that would be produced (e.g. info system map) that would help then perceive the worth of this work.  I have indicated the time taken for the different info gathering stages to give them a fuller picture of the detail involved.

You can expect significantly improved findability of information, greatly shortening the time it takes to find the right file or document. Likewise if you audit those records, you can most likely reduce the amount, cleaning up the signal to noise ration on that content. An analogy I give is that if done right, it should be as easy to find things on an internal system, as it is to search for facts on Wikipedia.

3) It may be a case of ‘how long’s a piece of string’ but are there any general timescales for how long inventorying takes?  Whether it’s in terms of ‘allow xhrs/days per y number  of people’ or any other rule of thumb from those of you with experience of this kind of work?

This is variable, but what you can do is take a look at 5-10% of the system, and estimate how long that will take (so 25 – 50k records) and extrapolate from that sample size. Still, there are some hidden variables such as change management and process control you’ll need to factor in. my quick advice is however long you THINK it will take- double it. It will set expectations, and give you room to breathe.

4) Is it  common for companies, even when they seem to understand they have a real info problem, to just underestimate the worth of this kind of work?

What you are doing is incredibly important, and yes it won’t be appreciated until that organization is sued, or audited- and they have to produce records from your new system. In fact, you have two methods of making the business case internally- carrot and stick. The carrot is all the nice things, speed, accessibility, better client service, and faster collaboration. The stick of course is what happens if you don’t change things, and something occurs.

Last but not least, make sure that your organization is fully committed to process improvement, and that the people are ready for it as well. With a good communication and training plan, and clear business objectives, you give yourself the best probability for success.