Progressive elaboration

In the last blog we discussed about projects and operations. The main characteristics that are been discussed are: projects are unique and projects are temporary. There is also another characteristic been discussed in PMBOK (2008) that is progressive elaboration.

Projects normally have a broad scope in the initiation stage. The scope gets elaborated once the project team gets more and more information about the domain during the progression of a project.  As a result of progressive elaboration, project manager can form a high quality and accurate project plans. Even though project team gets an accurate project plans due to progressive elaboration, it has a disadvantage too which is “scope creep”.  Scope creep means that additional scope which is been added to the project after the project’s objectives have been set. This will affect the cost, resource and time estimated for the project which is the main reasons for project to fail, overrun budget or miss deadlines.