ABC Bank is the pioneer private commercial bank in Ethiopia after the downfall of the military regime and the introduction of the market economic policy in 1991. It was established by 486 founder shareholders with a paid-up capital of Birr 24.2 million. Licensed on November 10, 1994, it started banking operations on February 13, 1995. The number of shareholders and paid-up capital increased continuously and currently reached over 3,700 and Birr 2.9 billion, respectively. Likewise, as of end June 2018, its total assets reached Birr 55.3 billion with over 366 branches found across the country. It is the first private bank in Ethiopia to exceed a billion-profit mark in the history of Ethiopian private banks in the financial year 2018, Annual Report, 2017/18. The bank has a vision to be one of the top ten private banks in East Africa by 2025. ABC Bank implemented and continues to implement many IT projects to carry out its operations effectively and to achieve its vision. The following are key projects implemented: Core banking system Hardware and Network infrastructure Channel Service applications like ATM, M-Wallet and Internet Banking Document management system Anti-Money Laundering solution Material Management System Human Resource Management System Trade Finance System CRM/CC ESB Some projects are developed locally but external vendors implement most of the projects. A separate project management office handles all the implemented and ongoing IT projects. Previously, only one project manager was assigned for all projects but currently there are three project managers assigned to ABCs IT projects. The project team is composed of functional and technical staff. Some of them are assigned exclusively to the project and some accomplish the project work together with their existing operations work.

Project management in general and project scope management in particular, are typically tied to organizational objectives and help to achieve specific outcomes. The ability to define and then effectively control the scope of a project depends a lot on the goals and requirements of the project. For this reason, it is necessary to gather the project requirements up front, before the planning for the project starts. By clearly understanding the needs of the stakeholders and the capabilities and constraints of ABCs resources, the bank has a higher chance of success. This case study looks at the practice and challenges of scope management in IT projects in ABC Bank. The case study examines the how scope is defined; what are the major sources of scope creep; and what are the problems experienced by ABC Bank with regards to scope management. This includes exploring the challenges, strengths and weaknesses of the project office/team in managing project scope. ABC bank follows a predictive approach especially for all projects implemented by external vendors. The project requirements are gathered and deliverables are defined up front, before the bank even starts the project. During the project life cycle, the users of the solutions always bring new requirements that were not included in the scope at the beginning. Scope changes also happen because even though project implementation requires meeting with stakeholders to gather requirements, there is often a lack of sufficient stakeholder involvement making it another source for

scope creep. Furthermore, the bank wants to be competitive in the market and wants to include all functionalities served by other banks that in turn creates scope creep, as it is often not defined during requirements collection. New technological advancements in the sector adds yet another dimension of scope creep. A lack of resources, a lack of scope control and poor requirements analysis are all drivers of scope creep. The amount of change requests increases from time to time and managing these changes created much stress for the project team. As a result of these changes, the bank is continuously being exposed to additional costs and the time to complete a project is also extended beyond the baseline plan. The project office faces many challenges during the implementation and even after the formal closure of the projects due to these ongoing scope change requests. A further impact of the continuous scope change requests during project is a reduction of the project team morale. A significant gap was identified in managing the scope of projects at ABC Bank that allowed for the ongoing changes to the scope of IT projects and managing it was a serious challenge for the project team. Source: Belete (2019)

Question

Scope creep is identified often as the leading cause of project failure. It would seem that ABC Bank has fallen victim to its negative effects. Analyse what are the major sources of scope creep in ABC Banks IT projects and what can you infer to be other possible sources of scope creep at ABC Bank.