- I'm not fond of surprises when I'm managing a project.
In my experience, surprises come
from two sources more often,
quality issues and scope changes.
Let's look at these potential budget-impacting sources.
Funding to manage the quality of the products
and services your projects produce is crucial
and it should be a large part
of your initial project budget.
As the project progresses, however,
quality concerns can affect your budget.
There are four elements of quality requiring your focus.
The first is prevention.
This is about keeping defects
out of your product or service
and this activity should be in your initial budget.
This involves plans and solution designs
that control the quality of your deliverables.
The second element is appraisal, which involves activities
verifying your products meet the requirements.
You do this via inspection and testing.
Also, appraisal includes tasks
to confirm the quality level of suppliers.
The final two quality elements are common sources
of surprise costs, and you should prepare
to address these quality impacts if they surface.
The first of these surprise impacts is internal failure.
These are costs related to finding
and correcting noted defects, rework costs, or scrap
when defective products are unusable.
We tend to underestimate the cost of remedying defects.
The final and most expensive quality element
is external failure.
These are quality costs you incur when your product
or service is in your customer's hands.
Included in external failure are complaints management,
returns and warranty costs, repairs and servicing,
and most devastating, recovering from reputation damage.
Internal and external failure issues
result in project and budget changes.
This turns our discussion to the cost of change.
A project change is when tasks are added or removed
from your project plan and the budget.
These changes are necessary to correct internal
or external failures.
You must update your budget once you understand
the expense needed to make corrections.
Other changes also affect your budget.
Like when stakeholders ask for scope changes.
These can surface because of a new idea
or a new business requirement.
Analyzing the costs for these proposed changes
is vital to support budget integrity.
While stakeholder change requests can be advantageous,
costs to manage, build, and test the change
must be added to your budget.
In addition, a change can increase complexity.
This can happen when the change scope
involves more technical interfaces,
more departments, or more complicated business processes,
so estimate the cost of added complexity as well.
Remember these quality and scope change elements
and you'll keep your project from being
like a haunted house full of scary surprises.