Week2 EDU6145 Project Management: Scope

As the director of the special education program at an elementary school on the Pine Ridge Reservation I was required to have activities to encourage parent involvement. The Special Education Department chose to have monthly parent meetings and include the parent training requirement with the parent involvement.

At the beginning of the second year of these meetings I was feeling confident that everything would go as smoothly as it had the year before, just changing the topics and dinner menu each month.  At the first meeting I handed out a survey with ideas for monthly topics.  My staff of one other teacher and three paraprofessionals, the designated parent volunteer, and the principal met. We decided as a team which topics we would cover and if there was not enough suggestions we filled in the missing months.  With this information we could determine if we needed to get speakers or if school employees could do the program.  We then planned the meals for the year including the Christmas meeting and he Easter Egg Hunt that the parents had sponsored and enjoyed the year before.  We soon had the approval of the principal who agreed to get the school board president to sign off on the plan.  I had to make a budget change request to the Bureau of Indian Affairs to get some extra money put into the parent training and involvement budget.  Not knowing any better I always prided myself on budgeting very tightly and sticking to the budget.

A parent and then more and more parents wanted to have an end of the year party at the big reservoir a ways from the school complete with a cookout and a movie at the theatre afterwards.  I told them that I just had not budgeted for this and we could put our heads together and find something less expensive and time consuming.  I was on contract but those who would be needed to help had to be paid for their time.  The parents took their wants to the school board and I was told to find a way to give the parents what they wanted.   About this time the dreaded Scope Creep began to creep into the project.  I had a meeting with the parents who decided that they could do without the movie but the beach and the cookout were definitely wanted.  I told them I would get together a new budget and present it to the school board the following week to see if they could help with the added expense.  And the next day we could meet and decide if there would still be more money needed and what to do next. 

The end of the school beach party turned out to be a success and all went well.  I had not heard of Instructional Design or project manager at that time, but fortunately I had a good staff and the support of the principal however I decided to handle the problem.  I know now that I had budgeted to closely, and did not anticipate or plan any problems.  In Project Management Planning, Scheduling, and Controlling Projects the authors wrote about anticipating common mistakes; one of the mistakes is “This project has been done many times before, so why do I have to plan it out again?” (Portny, Mantel, Meredith, Shafer, Sutton, & Kramer, 2008).  I had fallen into that frame of mind, changing only the topic month after month.  When the parents wanted something different it rocked the boat for a while and took a bit of rebudgetting and planning to complete the project successfully that year.

References

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.