Scope Creep

There are many times in my professional life when scope creep has occurred, thankfully I have not been in the capacity of an instructional designer or even the project manager.  I can recall one "team effort" in which we were supposed to create a professional learning community for our grade level teams in our school environment.  Our expected output was supposed to be a product that would be useful to our colleagues.  In any educational setting, you will find lots of buzzwords, and concepts of the moment.  "Best practices" happened to be one of those buzzwords at the time, and we decided to determine the best practices for increasing attendance in the virtual environment, as well as increasing the participation level of the students within that environment.  Not surprisingly, this rapidly got out of control!  We ended up taking out the "best practices" terminology, narrowing our subject mater to increasing and keeping attendance.  As we began working on this, data was required, and our data was leading us in all sorts of different directions.  It was snowballing, so we had to rein it in quickly.  We could have saved ourselves quite a bit of trouble if we had simply followed the advice of Shelly Doll "Break the approved deliverables into actual work requirements" (Doll, 2001).  If we had kept our focus on the actual deliverables, and actually delegated our product in parts to different members of the team, we would have avoided an awful lot of project creep issues. 

Noelle

Reference
Doll, S. (2001).  Seven steps for avoiding scope creep.  Retrieved from http://www.techrepublic.com/article/seven-steps-for-avoiding-scope-creep/1045555 on February 12, 2012.

Resource Allocation

http://www.brighthub.com/office/project-management/articles/11638.aspx
This website is fantastic, giving lots of good advice on allocating resources and common pitfalls.


http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/project-help/goal-resolve-resource-allocation-problems-HA010231904.aspx
This website gives you quite a few steps to resolve resource allocation problems.

http://sedatcilingir.edublogs.org/2011/07/29/project-management-in-education-estimating-costs-and-allocating-resources/'
This is a fantastic resource that gives a bunch of resources to help in the asset allocation process.

It's fascinating to see all the different resources available online to learn more about allocating resources and problems with that.