The Fixed Deadline With a Moving Scope
A regional council has approved a 14-week project to migrate its permit-processing system to a new platform. The sponsor signed off on a scope statement, a 12-week delivery schedule, and a 2-week contingency buffer. In week 5, the sponsor asks the project manager to add a public-facing status portal so residents can track applications. The portal is estimated at 4 weeks of one developer's time. The same developer is currently the only person who can build the data-migration scripts, which sit on the critical path. The sponsor says the portal is 'non-negotiable' but that the original go-live date must hold. No additional budget has been approved.
1. Identify the constraint conflict in this situation and explain what the project manager should do before agreeing to anything.
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The project is triple-constrained: fixed date, fixed budget, and now an added scope item. The PM must not accept the portal as a silent scope change. The correct move is to treat it as a change request and produce an impact analysis: 4 weeks of the sole migration developer's time pushes the critical-path migration scripts, which threatens the 14-week date even with the 2-week buffer. The PM should document the request, quantify the schedule and cost impact, present options to the sponsor (descope something of equal size, extend the date, or fund a second developer), and get a signed decision. Agreeing verbally and 'finding time later' converts a known trade-off into an invisible one and destroys the baseline's usefulness.
2. The sponsor insists the portal must ship and the date must hold. What is the most defensible planning response?
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With date and scope both fixed, the only movable levers are budget and resources. The PM should propose adding capacity rather than compressing the existing critical path. Options: hire or reassign a developer so the migration scripts are not delayed, or phase the portal as a post-go-live release with its own mini-baseline. Phasing is often the strongest answer because it protects the go-live and gives the portal a realistic slot. Either way the PM re-baselines formally, records the decision in the change log, and updates the scope statement. The wrong answer is to accept the portal and quietly absorb it into contingency - that hides the overrun until it is unrecoverable.