What is scope creep and why should a project manager be concerned about it?

 

Sometimes, the requirements of a project increase over time. This means that over a project's lifecycle, you will find that sometimes the deliverables of a project increase from two to six. This situation is what leads to scope creep where the scope of the project in question increases, without the management having a special plan in place to accommodate those changes. Scope creep is a real thing that affects projects from time to time.

A manager should be concerned about scope creep because it increases the length of a project. When the length of a project increases beyond the levels that were thought to be the right ones, what happens is that the project deliverables and objectives are usually delayed from being completed. In this situation, project objectives take longer to be achieved, which in turn means that the project can be costly. Therefore, for the simple fact that a scope creep can make the project to be costly and make it run for a long period of time, means that the project manager should be concerned about it.