You don’t need to be involved in project management for long to come across “scope creep”, which can end up being a major problem. Each extra little suggestion seems like a good idea at the time, and only a tiny bit more work. Soon, though, the extra little things begin to take over the project, and the focus on what was originally planned is lost.

It’s important to spot scope creep starting, and put a stop to it early on. But reading a recent post by Josh Nankivel, called Jenga Project Management Processes, reminded me that there’s another area where project managers need to pay a little more attention, and that’s process creep.

You may not have heard it called that before, but I bet you have come across process creep. You start off with a project with a tight, lean set of processes – just enough to make sure the project is under control. And then someone makes a suggestion…

Suddenly, you have a process for checking in and out project files – even though there’s only one person that does it. Then there’s a process for asking a question about the requirements, and a form to fill in. Then a process for confirming you’ve received a work package, and another one for confirming it has been submitted when you finish.

Eventually you find yourself with a process to go through before a process can be updated or removed or added or you can even go to the bathroom!

Don’t get me wrong, I can see a place for all of these processes – well, almost all. But that place isn’t on most projects. Large, complicated projects need a lot of work to make sure they are kept under control. When you have many people working towards the same goal, perhaps fity, a hundred people, or more, you need to make sure they all know what needs to be done, and how to do it.

But each of these processes is an overhead. In a large project, you have to accept the overhead, because the likely outcome of not having these processes is much more costly, in terms of mistakes, and reworking, and so on, than just having them.

Most projects, though, just aren’t that big. If only one person is updating project files, then they don’t need to check them out – they just need to do it. If someone has a query about the requirements, ask the person that wrote them for clarification, don’t fill in a form requesting that he or she be asked. Make a note of the answer, sure, but don’t make a novel out of it.

Every process has to be looked at in terms both of the benefits it provides, and of the costs it imposes. Generally, the benefits are about avoiding duplicate work, avoiding wrong work, and making sure everyone knows what they need to be doing. But the costs are about lost time, both yours and your project team’s – every time they are filling in a form, or following an unnecessary process, they aren’t getting on with the actual project work.

So keep an eye out for process creep. Remember, a process is just a tool to help you get the project done successfully. If it’s getting in the way of that instead, then you need to fix it, or bin it.