As I near the end of my graduate class in Project
Management, I can now reflect back on some projects that I have worked on in
the past and see how the timeline and budget were effected by scope creep. One specific project that comes to mind was
when I was working on our school improvement committee in the district in which
I work. Our team was given the task to
provide training to teachers that would instruct them how to incorporate data
driven instruction into their teaching. Although
the plan looked good on paper, it turned out to be more than our four team
could handle due to scope creep throughout the project.
The
initial plan was to begin with individual department meetings where we would
show teachers how to access and interpret the formative assessment data from
the standardized tests that were being administered at the end of each grading
period. We would then have teachers
discuss how the data could be used to make informed decisions regarding
instruction. We would follow up the
department meetings with individual classroom visits to see how the teachers
were using the data to adjust their instruction. However, when we began to develop the
training, we realized that the teachers would first have to create student
rosters for each of their classes before being able to access the necessary
data in a meaningful way. Because teachers were not familiar with how to perform
this task, we needed to take time from the training to cover this. It was also brought to the team’s attention
that data for many of the students who had recently transferred into the district
was not available because they had not been entered into the tracking system
properly. Our team was asked to identify
the students and enter in the correct information prior to the training so that
teachers would have access to all of their students. This was a tedious job and took up a total of
three team meetings to complete. As more
and more was added onto the scope of the project, the timeline continued to
expand. In the end, the teachers did not
receive the training until the beginning of the final grading period. By then, it was almost impossible to make
meaningful changes to instruction that would have an impact on student achievement. We could only hope that the teachers would
remember what they had learned from the training when they returned the
following school year. In the end, our
team was required to present the training again at the start of the following
school year.
As I
look back on the project, I can see how, as a project manager, I could have
handled the situation differently.
First, I would have delegated many of additions to the scope of the
project. At the time of the project,
there was a staff member that was responsible for training teachers on how to
administer the formative assessment. This trainer had failed to include building
student rosters into the original training program. I would have asked the trainer to create
tutorial or worksheet to instruct teachers how to complete this task. This would remove the responsibility from the
team and provide teachers with the necessary information in advance so that
time would not be needed during the data training. Also, I would have delegated the responsibility
of fixing the data for new students to the technology team. They would have been the ones to originally
enter the data and should have been required to fix their mistakes. This again would have taken the responsibility
from the data team and allowed them to focus more on the original scope of the
project. Delegating project tasks that are
related to scope creep can not only help to keep a project on time and on
budget, but it can also help to reduce the amount on stress on the project team
and to keep their focus on the original goals of the project.
