Case 2 - A council system where nobody ever signed the scope

Initiation failures (before any build)

• The business case was never translated into measurable success criteria: 30% faster processing needs a baseline cycle time, a measurement method and an owner.
• Requirements were unvalidated and unowned - 31 assumed requirements are not agreed scope, they are the analyst's guesses.
• No acceptance criteria. Meets business needs is untestable and guarantees a dispute at sign-off.
• No governance decision on who may approve scope; councillors were allowed to function as approvers by default.

Scope-control failures (during delivery)

• No change control: two features were added to the backlog and one was built with no impact assessment, no approval, no funding decision.
• No WBS and no baseline, so 62% of budget against 40% of scope cannot be measured against anything.
• Cost discipline absent: time-and-materials with the project manager approving invoices creates a self-approval loop with no link between payment and accepted deliverables.

Missing artefacts: signed scope statement and requirements, baselined WBS, change control process and log, acceptance criteria, cost/schedule baseline with EVM, and a RACI showing who decides scope.

Diagnosis: the green rating is not optimism so much as the absence of data capable of producing red.

Immediate action: stop work on the status checker. Sunk cost is not an argument for continuing, and continuing builds an unapproved deliverable that will be cited later as evidence it was in scope.

Process

1. Register both features as change requests with unique IDs, regardless of who asked.
2. Produce a one-page impact assessment for each: cost, schedule effect, effect on the 30% processing target, and what would be displaced if funded.
3. Route both to the project board or sponsor for a decision. Councillors are influential stakeholders, not approvers; the board decides, and the decision is recorded.
4. Reconcile any decision with the funding authority - if the features are to proceed, additional budget or a descoped item must be named.

What to say to the councillors: acknowledge the public commitment and the value of the feature; explain that the project is 62% through budget at 40% of scope and cannot absorb unfunded scope without delaying the licensing replacement; offer a dated option - phase 2, or a funded change with an explicit trade-off. Do not promise a date you cannot control.

Reasoning: the political cost of saying no is real, which is why offering a credible deferred path matters more than winning the principle.

Position to state

• Report actuals honestly: 62% of budget consumed, approximately 40% of planned scope delivered, no baseline existed, so prior green ratings were unsupported.
• Reconstruct a baseline retrospectively and label it clearly as retrospective; it is legitimate for control from now on, but it cannot retroactively prove performance.
• State that acceptance criteria are not defined and that this is the largest single closure risk, because the council cannot prove delivery and the vendor cannot prove acceptance.
• Quantify exposure on the time-and-materials contract: invoices approved by the project manager with no deliverable verification.

First corrective action: freeze scope and get written sign-off on the requirements set and acceptance criteria - including a measurable definition of the 30% processing improvement - before any further build or invoice approval. Nothing else can be controlled until scope is defined.

Then: establish change control with a board-level approval threshold, separate invoice certification from the project manager, and put cost and schedule on a baseline with earned value reporting. Avoid the temptation to convert to fixed price immediately for the remaining unclear scope; that simply prices the ambiguity into a risk premium.