What's your approach to scope creep, as a TPM?

As a Technical Program Manager (TPM), managing scope creep is crucial to ensure project success. Scope creep occurs when changes are made to the project scope without proper control, leading to potential delays, budget overruns, and resource misallocation. Here are some strategies to manage and prevent scope creep effectively:

1. Define a Clear Project Scope: Establish a well-defined project scope at the beginning, detailing all deliverables and exclusions. This involves creating a scope management plan that outlines the project's objectives and boundaries. This plan serves as a reference to remind stakeholders of the agreed-upon scope when new requests arise.

2. Implement a Change Control Process: Develop a formal change control process to handle any requests for additional features or changes. This process should require stakeholders to submit change requests, which are then reviewed to assess their impact on the project's timeline, budget, and resources. Only approved changes should be incorporated into the project.

3. Communicate Effectively with Stakeholders: Maintain open and transparent communication with all stakeholders to manage expectations and prevent misunderstandings. Regularly update them on project progress and any potential impacts of requested changes.

4. Monitor Project Progress and Baseline: Continuously monitor the project's status against the baseline scope using variance analysis. This helps in identifying any deviations early and allows for corrective actions to be taken.

5. Prioritize Deliverables: When changes are necessary, consider de-prioritizing other deliverables to accommodate new requests without affecting the overall project timeline.

6. Leverage Agile Methodologies: Agile project management can help manage scope creep by allowing for iterative development and regular feedback loops. This approach can make projects more adaptable to change while keeping them aligned with stakeholder needs.

7. Educate and Empower Your Team: Ensure that your team understands the importance of adhering to the project scope and empower them to push back on requests that fall outside the agreed-upon scope without proper approval

As a TPM I would use a combination of proactive measures and a reactive strategy.

For the proactive measures I would emphasize on detailed planning, clear communication and evaluation during execution.

For the reactive strategy I would implement risk management, run risk-benefit analysis of scope increase proposals and will implement scope change management with clear and open communication. I would also implement a change management council with representation for all the stakeholders.

When changing scope for the program it would go through analysis of the risk and benefits, what would be the impact on increasing the scope for the program and running the decision through the council. If the scope change is approved the program items need to be reprioritized. If the risk is too high and the benefit is too low then the scope change can be pushed out. In all situations it is important to keep open and honest communication with stakeholders.

When working on a program to improve the continuous integration systems for Flutter. The initial program proposed a program duration of two years improving the infrastructure first, followed by migration of the engine repository, followed next with the framework repository and finally migrating the plugins repositories. A few months during the execution there was a proposal to increase the scope of the program to include test frameworks and testing. I ran a cost-benefit analysis and found that even when investments in testing would bring huge benefits it would delay the improvements fixing development velocity. I documented the cost-benefit analysis and the findings and shared with stakeholders to alignment. The final decision was to push back on the scope change and everybody was aligned with the decision.

The Product Backlog is often reviewed with the Product Owner and the team to keep it aligned with the roadmap (feature Level) and with the product objective and vision also on establish clear acceptance criteria as to what will needed in the  story for the PO to accept and also clear Definition of Done details when the story is considered to be completed .