Sunday, February 12, 2012

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.

3 comments:

  1. Wow!!! Noelle, that's quite a bit on your hands. Breaking the approved deliverables into actual work requirements (Doll, 2001) would have probably saved you much. However, your team has done the right thing in observing 'best practices'. While scope creep is inevitable, I believe if the PM and team members exercise management skills, it (scope creep) can be curbed. Portny et. al (2008) contended that "managing a project involves continually planning what to do, checking on progress, comparing progess to plan, taking corrective action to bring progress into agreement with the plan if it is not, and replanning when needed" (p. 317). Could it be that one of the reasons for projects getting out of hand is the lack of the monitoring and controlling aspects?

    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.

    Portny, S. E., Mantel, S. J., Meredith, J. R., Shafer, S. M., Sutton, M. M., & Kramer, B. E. (2008). Project management: Planning, scheduling, and controlling projects. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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  2. Its funny you mentioned "Best Practices" as we are going thru a Compliance Unit Inspection(CUI) at our base. I can definitely see the how a scope creep can be seen. There are so many folks who are have work completely to have the best practice and nothing else. It becomes a more individual game than a team or unit that get the project done and it can be detrimental(Portny, 2009). Its important to watch for these type of appraisal as its supposed to enhance teamwork and not divide a team.

    Hermes

    Portny, S. E., Mantel, S. J., Meredith, J. R., Shafer, S. M., Sutton, M. M., & Kramer, B. E. (2008). Project management: Planning, scheduling, and controlling projects. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc

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    Replies
    1. I have to agree with you about sometimes when working in teams it can turn into the individual game to make progress on a project. In my past experience this has happened and it was very stressful and time consuming for me because we turned into me while working on the team

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