Disguised Project

Applicability: Disguised projects are commonly found where there is a separation between operational and capital budgets. It is also found where there is inadequate control over the parameters of BAU work, or over the threshold that must be reached to trigger project inception.

Structure: A Kanban Team will action items that are drawn from an ordered backlog, each of which may require a certain quality of service. Work In Progress limits will be observed, and metrics will be used to inspect and adapt the team’s working practices on an iterative and time-boxed basis. The backlog is expected to consist of “Business As Usual” changes that are small and repeatable in nature. However, large or mutually dependent work items will have been placed on it that do not represent BAU work, and which are associated with significant scope risk.

Motivation: Some changes to IT systems can be trivial in nature, such as minor amendments to site content or defect fixes. This type of work is considered to be “Business As Usual” (BAU) and as such it is often absorbed by the organization-at-large as an operational expense. Departmental stakeholders who want more substantial changes must usually resource a suitable project from their capital budgets. They therefore have an incentive to disguise such work, either by misrepresenting it as a normal operational small change, or by breaking it up into a series of small changes that they hope will slip through a BAU work-stream unnoticed.

Also Known As: Scope Creep (in a Business As Usual context)