Processpredictive
The mayor's playground
You are managing the reconstruction of a neighbourhood park for a Skopje municipality. The project is financed 85% by an IPA grant under a signed grant agreement, and its scope, budget and end date are baselined.
Halfway through the works, the mayor's chief of staff visits the site together with the contractor's foreman and asks you to add a children's playground on the northern lawn — "while the crews are already here; it is a small thing, and the mayor has promised it to the residents." The contractor says the work is straightforward and offers to send a price by Friday.
The project sponsor, the head of the municipality's development department, is on leave for two weeks and unreachable. The grant agreement allows changes to the scope only with the contracting authority's prior written approval.
What should you do?
Pick the option that looks best to you, then reveal the answer.
Reveal the answer
Best answer
CAssess the impact on scope, schedule, cost, risk and the grant conditions, document a change request and route it through the project's change control process, and tell the chief of staff when a decision can be expected.
The project manager neither approves nor refuses a change; the project manager makes sure the request is analysed and reaches the people who own the decision, with its impact written down. That is what integrated change control is.
Three of the four options are about who decides; the right one is about what comes first. Here the decision belongs to the change control board and, because of the grant, to the contracting authority — not to the mayor's office, not to the contractor and not to you. What is yours is the analysis: what the playground does to the schedule, the budget, the risk profile and, above all, the eligibility of the cost under the grant. Doing that analysis now, while the sponsor is away, is the best use of the two weeks, and telling the chief of staff honestly when and how the decision will be taken keeps the relationship intact without promising anything you cannot deliver.
Why the other options are tempting but wrong
A. A refusal is a decision, and it is not yours to make. The baseline is not a wall; it is the reference against which a change is evaluated. Saying no before the analysis pre-empts the change control board and the contracting authority, and it turns the most influential stakeholder on the project into an opponent for nothing.
B. This is scope creep in its purest form: work added to the project without evaluation or authorisation, reported after the fact. Under a grant agreement it is worse than usual — a cost incurred without the contracting authority's written approval can be declared ineligible and recovered from the municipality years later.
D. Waiting feels safe and is not. The impact assessment does not need the sponsor; it needs you, and two weeks is plenty. And the premise is wrong: the sponsor is not the only approver here — the grant makes the contracting authority one too, and the change control board, if the project has one, is where the request goes first.
Where this sits in PMI
PMBOK Guide 7th ed., Planning and Delivery performance domains; integrated change control (PMBOK Guide 6th ed., section 4.6). Principles: stewardship, stakeholder engagement. The grant condition makes this a compliance question as much as a scope one.
Exam Content Outline tasks (PMP ECO)
- Process 10 — Manage project changes
- Process 8 — Plan and manage scope
- Business Environment 1 — Plan and manage project compliance