1. Scope Creep and the St. Francis Dam disaster of 1928
Scope creep is changing the original scope during the course of the project without considering the impact this change has on other constraints such as time, cost, or even customer approval.
This this is the bane of the project manager, and it is hard to underestimate the importance of protecting against it. At a recent meeting of the Orange County Project Masters Club, a Toastmasters club for Project Managers, one of our members, Van Wray, gave a talk on the St. Francis Dam disaster of 1928.
NOTE: I must commend Mr. Wray on his excellent presentation; he won the award for the best speech of the evening, and he definitely deserved it. (I can say that with particular conviction because he won against the speech I gave that same evening!)
The St. Francis Dam was located about 40 miles NW of Los Angeles, and was constructed in 1924 and 1926 under the supervision of the legendary chief engineer William Mulholland. The dam collapsed just before midnight on March 12, 1928, killing 600 people in the ensuing flood. On the morning before the flood, the dam keeper alerted Mulholland to a leak, which seemed particularly ominous since it was a leak of dirty water, indicating that erosion may have been occurring at the foundation. Mulholland deemed the dam safe, but his judgment was proved wrong less than 24 hours later.
A commission formed at the time to analyze the cause of the disaster laid the fault on incomplete knowledge of the geology of the rock formations around the dam. However, a more recent study published in 2004 in the journal California History by historians Norris Hundley Jr. (Professor Emeritus, UCLA) and Donald C. Jackson (Professor Lafayette College) showed that the more direct root cause of the disaster was that there were two changes in the height of the dam that were done without having an engineering analysis done of the effect of those changes on the rest of the dam’s design. In other words, as we would put it today in project management terms, 600 people died because of scope creep. It was one of the largest civil engineering disasters of the 20th century, and was responsible for the second largest loss of life in California in the 20th century, second only to the great San Francisco earthquake of 1906.
2. Scope Management
The PMBOK® Guide lists 5 processes for the management of project scope.
| Process Group | Process Number | Process Name | Process Description |
| Planning | 5.1 | Collect Requirements | Defining and documenting stakeholders’ needs to meet the project objectives.
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| 5.2 | Define Scope | Developing a detailed description of the project and product.
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| 5.3 | Create WBS | Subdivides projectdeliverables and project work into smaller, more manageable components.
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| Monitoring& Controlling | 5.4 | Verify Scope | Formalizing acceptance of the project deliverables with the customer.
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| 5.5 | Control Scope |
Monitoring status of the project and product scope and managing changes to the scope baseline. |
What I plan to do is go through these five processes in some detail to discuss each of the processes and to discern some principles that project managers can take away to be able to manage the scope on a project.
The next post will go through the first process, that of Collecting Requirements. It’s not just collecting them and collating them, but resolving conflicting requirements that it is the key to avoiding scope changes later on in the project.
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