Gold plating is a bad practice, though in some cases it may help to improve the customer relationships temporarily. Many projects face issues because of gold plating and impacts the project(s) negatively. Hence gold plating is certainly treated as a bad practice. This brings up the question: “what is gold plating in project management?”
Project constraints such as scope, time, cost, resources, risks, quality are related to each other. Changes in one or more of the project constraints may impact the others.
What is Gold Plating?
Whenever there are changes in the project, they should be managed through change control procedures to effectively manage the changes.
Change control procedures will asses the impact to the overall project and ensure that project stays in good health, in terms of its constraints.
Sometimes, it is easy for the project team to get side tracked to work on extra features or functionalities, which are not part of the project scope. This may impact the project constraints, and finally impact the outcome of the project.
While there are many reasons for the gold plating in project management, the most common reason is to delight the customer.
What is Gold Plating in Project Management?
What is Gold Plating in Project Management?
Gold plating in project management refers to the practice, where the project team works in enhancing the product features or functionality, which was not part of the project scope.
One of the primary reasons for gold plating is, one or more project team members or the project manager himself wanted to display their abilities in the work to the customer or senior management. The project team “assumes”, this would please or delight the customer for sure.
However, it may annoy the customer as the functionality added in the product may result in ruining the customer plans, methodologies, and strategies for the product.
Even if it delights the customer for the first time, the customer may come back and expects you to delivery another such feature with free of cost next time.
So, in any case, gold plating is a bad practice for your project and the organization as well.
If you are not familiar with scope creep, please read the article, what is scope creep in project management?
Causes of Gold Plating
Causes Of Gold Plating in Project Management
While gold plating is done by the project team or the project manager with good intentions, it eventually backfires on them. Typically, gold plating happens in the project for the following reasons.
- Team members adding extra functionality to the product to show his abilities to the project manager or senior management.
- Project manager adding the extra functionalities to the project, to earn credit from customer or senior management. Or the project manager has other intentions to join the customer organization.
- Lack of clarity in the scope – Team members assume some un scoped requirements as implicit and add the same in the product.
- Surprisingly, certain team members with lot of slack add the extra functionality, as they have free time and they assume this is going to do good for the customer.
- Sometimes, you do gold plating to divert the customer attention from product defects.
Gold Plating Example in Software Projects
Taking the same example of software developing project, while developing the project, one of project team member thought that this extra functionality will add value to the customer, as it looks good. For example, he added a video which will give brief about the product to the end user. And the project team delivered the product to the customer.
When customer looked at the extra feature of adding the video of the product, he also observed that the web page performance is impacted, which is violating one of the quality requirements of the product.
So, customer asked the project team to remove this extra functionality, as it does not exist in the agreed scope.
Now the project team must spend good time, effort, and cost on the project to remove the extra unnecessary functionality and retest the product, before you deliver to the customer.
Here the project team was trying to please the customer, by adding an extra functionality, with good intentions. But it has done bad to the customer. And costed more to the project. This is a clear example of gold plating in project management.
Effects of Gold Plating in Project Management
Effects of Gold Plating
Though, gold plating is done with positive intentions, it results in creating issues to the project and organization. The following are the impacts of gold plating.
- Increase in the project cost – Usually, top skilled resources do gold plating. And it takes good time and effort from these top resource without doing any good for the project.
- Gold plating is impacting one or more of the project constraints. So, by doing gold plating
- You are trying to deliver something that you are not supposed to.
- And missing something from your project (project constraints), which you are committed to.
- Increased the project risk – Since you are adding more (extra) functionality, you may get more defects, compare to original scope.
- Once you deliver the extra functionality to the customer, then customer may expect similar extra functionalities in your future engagements.
- More importantly, though you did the gold plating with good intention. But if it does bad for the customer, he may ask to remove this extra functionality. This may take even more time, effort and cost for the project.
How Do You Manage Gold Plating In Your Project?
How to Manage Gold Plating In Your Project
Following are some measures, the project manager needs to ensure to deal with gold plating situations in the project.
- Project manager should create awareness to the team members of the situations of gold plating. And ensure that the project team follows the scope agreed for the project.
- If there are any scope issues, project manager must involve for further discussions. And see which the best way to resolve it, instead of giving controls completely to the project team. The intention here is not to ask the project manager to micro manage the project. But to make sure that, he has taken all the measures to resolve the gold plating issues in the team.
- Project manager should establish a good communication channel with the project team. This will help in having periodical meetings on the project scope and how the project team is progressing. Also, this will avoid last minute surprises.
- Project manager should realize the threat of gold plating. And make sure he is unknowingly not in the trap of gold plating.
Summary
We learned about “what is gold plating in project management”? Gold plating in project management refers to providing extra functionality to the customer, which is not in the original project scope.
There are many reasons for gold plating in project management, while the most common reason is to delight the customer.
While gold plating may do some good in the short term, but in longer run it damages the project.
As a skilled project manager, you must utilize your experiences, learning, and knowledge base on identifying the gold plating situations and prevent or avoid them in the projects.
