You have collected the requirements for your project and are creating the scope statement and work breakdown structure. During this process, you notice some functionality in your database system that will help a different project within your PMO. What should you do next?
What Won’t Work
Placing the feature in the other project’s backlog and asking them to prioritize it isn’t the best answer. This puts the responsibility on the other project team and removes your control of the situation. You cannot force another project to adopt your suggestion.
Raising the functionality in your risk register as a threat and creating a mitigation response also isn’t the answer – threats are things you want to avoid or minimize. This functionality is not a threat, it is an opportunity.
Adding the scope to your project and completing it as soon as possible to help the other team expands your project scope to work that does not deliver value to your own project. It also distracts you from your own core objectives.
What You Should Do
Raise the functionality in your risk register as an opportunity and select the exploit response. Opportunities are positive events that can benefit your project or the organization.
Then meet with the other project team and your sponsor to discuss. Share what you have discovered. Explore whether it makes sense to build this functionality into your project. Discuss how it could benefit both projects and the broader organization.
Why This Approach Works
Opportunities require different handling than threats. When you identify an opportunity, you want to exploit it or enhance it. This means:
Taking action to make the opportunity happen. Building the functionality in your project if it makes business sense.
Escalating the decision appropriately. Your sponsor needs to decide whether this is worth pursuing and whether it aligns with organizational strategy.
Collaborating with other project teams. The other project team may have insights about how this functionality could benefit them.
The Bigger Picture
As a project manager, you are part of a larger organization. If you spot something that creates value across multiple projects, that is worth raising. But you raise it through the proper channels: your risk register, your sponsor and cross-project collaboration.
Do not try to solve it alone by changing your project scope. Escalate and collaborate.
– David McLachlan
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