Week 6 Post

Describe a project, either personal or professional, that experienced issues related to scope creep. What specific scope creep issues occurred? How did you or other stakeholders deal with those issues at the time? Looking back on the experience now, had you been in the position of managing the project, what could you have done to better manage these issues and control the scope of the project?




When one is working on a project, whether it be as merely a stakeholder or as the Project Manager, scope creep can certainly occur. This can cause previous plans to be restructured and tweaked to fit this new problem, or series of them, which has come up from an unexpected occurrence. Scope creep does not necessarily derail your project, but it is one of those little things that may pop up along the way and cause us to revise, rethink, and to rearrange certain aspects of project. This can range from monetary changes to our budget, adding or removing team members, or even changes in software to minor things like classroom scheduling and other logistics.

Last summer as my team and I initially began to change from the previous English course offering (ENG 80 and 90, Reading 80 and 90) to the current content (Eng 85 and 95) we found that scope creep occurred weekly, if not daily in some cases. It all began as we shuffled team members only a few weeks into our project due to unforeseen circumstances. This caused there to be more English instructors creating modules and caused a deficit in the number of Reading instructors who were to contribute to our final proposal.

We worked around this as I and another former Reading instructor chose to create the bulk of the material which was destined to cover that part of our state competencies. While this allowed us to mold those modules in the ways we wanted it also increased our workload by doubling it. It forced us to push our deadlines back a week or two, but in the end we were better off because of this, in my opinion.

Another type of scope creep that occurred during this project was when our new attendance software killed two computer labs in two days, the first two days of summer school. We were forced to find a better solution in a hurry, and thus turned to the tried and true method of using a traditional sign in sheet. In the end this data was a bit more difficult to gather in this manner, but we dealt with it and I think it made us function better as a team as well.

In conclusion, as I look back at this there are several things I would have done differently as the PM. First and foremost, I would have been more discerning in choosing the team members and secondly I would have made sure that all competency areas were equally covered.

Also I would have tested the software a bit more vigorously and I also would have had a back-up plan in place just in case something did not work. We all learned a lot from this experience and now we have created two functional learning experiences which are now being used at a variety of college campuses across NC.