Scope Creep

For my look at scope creep this week I would like to use the project that I discussed a few weeks ago for our look at projects “post mortem.” The project has been the biggest project yet that I have worked on in my life and therefore it is my common “go to” when speaking about our own personal examples. Hence, please excuse me for repeating any information that you may have already read in the previous post about my project, Scarlet and Gray Ag Day (SGAD).

The project Scarlet and Gray Ag Day was a project that I was the chairmen of in college. In general the project consisted of yearlong planning culminating in one day in which Columbus area elementary school students attend hands on sessions on the ag campus at OSU to learn all about agriculture and the agricultural industry. It included committee work, working with stakeholders like presenters, student workers, elementary school teachers, financial supporters, organization and a lot of communication.

A little bit into the project I realized that the project was turning into a lot more than I had expected. The planning committee had decided to add extra elements into the program such as a lunch complete with a short speech from the Ohio Director of Agriculture who would be attending and a workshop for teachers several weeks before the actual SGAD event to teach students how to incorporate agriculture into their classrooms more. The project was already a huge undertaking and it suddenly began to grow which provided more organizational and planning issues. Not as much attention was able to be given to each task because our committee was spread so thin because of the creep of the scope.

The SGAD committee and I worked through these issues by meeting weekly and discussing the tasks that needed attention immediately. Committees that were only supposed to be worrying about a specific task on the day of the event were asked to add more to their workload and some were asked to add tasks related to the teacher workshop which had not originally been on the scope to their workload. The committee members were all ambitious so it worked out but having the original scope set up correctly would have provided a much smoother planning process.

Looking back on the project and what I have learned in the project management course, I think that I would have done some things differently in order to provide a smoother planning process. A smooth project begins with the planning. Setting up the scope, getting your team together to start the project and assigning specific tasks would have allowed me to see the picture much more clearly (Greer, 2012). It is one thing to talk about assignments and tasks and ask committee members to complete them but it would be another to provide committee members with a visual Gantt chart that they can refer back to. Setting up a scope statement would have provided me with a clear outlook of what needed to happen. In this week’s reading there is a checklist to “Keep the Project Moving” and included is to check back to the scope documents and address any changes weekly (Greer, 2010). We would do something like this during the planning process but not officially. By being structured about it and really addressing these changes may have provided a little less stress and more organization. “Project managers should approach changes of scope in a business-like fashion (Greer, 2010).”

The scope changes may not have been a problem if they had been anticipated previous to the project start and if it had been addressed correctly.

Greer, M., 2010. The Project Management Minimalist; Just Enough PM to Rock your Projects. Laureate University Institutions.