Systems Thinking, Project Management, and Agile - Part 8: Design Changes and Scope

[For this series, it will help to have read "System Dynamics and Causal Loop Diagrams 101."]

For the conclusion of this series, I’ll look at several other levers that management can control when working to keep their teams in good health: Design and scope changes.

Changes in design can either be tightly or loosely coupled to changes in scope. In general, you can't change one without changing the other. This is how I think of design and scope. Others think of them differently.

Few people intentionally change the scope of a project. Design changes, however, are usually intentional and frequent. They are also usually small relative to the overall project design so their effect on scope and progress can go unnoticed.

Nonetheless, small design changes are additive. Accumulate enough of them and it becomes apparent that scope has been affected. Few people recognize what has happened until it's too late. A successive string of "little UI tweaks," a "simple" addition to handle another file format that turned out to be not-so-simple to implement, a feature request slipped in by a senior executive to please a super important client - changes like this incrementally and adversely impact the delivery team's performance.