Project Management in Practice Child Support Software a Victim of Scope Creep In March 2003, the United Kingdom's Child Support Agency (CSA) started using their new 456 million ($860 million) software system for receiving and disbursing child support payments. However, by the end of 2004 only about 1'2 per cent of all applications had received payments. and even those took about three times longer than normal to process. CSA thus threatened to scrap the entire system and withhold 1 million ($2 million) per month in service payments to the software vendor. The problem was thought to be due to both scope creep and the lack of a risk management strategy. The vendor claimed that the project was disrupted constantly by CSA's 2500 change requests, while CSA maintained there were only 50. but the contract did not include a scope management plan to help dene what constituted a scope change request. And the lack of a risk management strategy resulted in no contingency or fallback plans in case of trou- ble, so when project delays surfaced and inadequate training became apparent, there was no way to recover. Questions 1. What was the source of the problem here? 2. How might a project charter as described above have helped avoid these shortcomings? 3. What would you suggest to recover the project? Source: Project Management Institute. \"Lack of Support,\" PM Net work. Vol. 19