Today I will be discussing
Scope Creep and an experience I have had. First for anyone not sure what scope
creep is; it is not Creep who likes to scope out people or situations. In instructional design scope creep is
the natural tendency of the client, as well as project team members, to try to
improve the project’s output as he project progresses (Portny, Mantel,
Meredith, Shafer, Sutton, & Kramer, 2008).
My
experience has been that any project I have worked on ends up being much larger
and time consuming than expected.
The last Reservation Wide Early Intervention Conference that I sponsored
is a good example of scope creep taking over and almost ending a project.
I
was a teacher as well as the States Single Point of Contact for children and
families birth to three with special needs. This was the third year I had planned the conference. The response had been great for the
past two years and I wanted this to be the best yet. I am a micromanager, which is not good, I found an excellent
speaker who was available and made all the arrangements. The conference committee got together
and plans were made for the breakout sessions, meal, and other logistics. By the time that the plans were put on
paper we realized that the building that we had used previously would not be
big enough so a person was assigned to look for another place to have the
meeting.
As
time went by there were more and more breakout sessions added, the speaker
wanted a little more time, the caterers for the meal back out, and
registrations were almost double the year before.
Thankfully
all details were worked out, the high school allowed us to use their gym and
classrooms for the breakout sessions.
The schedule was amended, and the cooks from two of the reservation
schools offered to cook the meal if they had help serving and cleaning up. The
high school allowed us to use their kitchen and permission from the
administration was granted for us to use the maintenance crew to clean up and
high school kids who stayed in the dorms helped with serving.
Working
cooperatively all went well, we had fun and best of all we only went over the
budget by $25.00.
I
learned a great deal from this experience. In the future I will assign jobs and then let them do the
job with just weekly reports. I
will start with a plan that will include putting a limit on the number of
sessions we have and the number of registrations we take.
The cooks will be asked again instead of caterers,
their food was delicious. Instead of my project it became the team and
communities project and therefore was more valuable to all.
