Adventures In Scope Creep...

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.