Analyzing the Scope Creep

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Analyzing the Scope Creep 

Sometimes a picture says more the words. In the picture you see above you see how the man is whistling happily with no idea he has a monster behind him.  That is kind of what happens when a project manager does not plan for possible risk and for changes in a project.  All the changes that occur during the project are scope creep (Pornty, Mantel, Meredith, Shafer, Sutton, & Kramer, 2008).  Budgets can get out hand and the amount of work estimated for the project can double if the project scope is not controlled

My latest experience with the scope creep was while making an overhaul of an existing course. The project managers made big changes to a course but never thought to check the media content to see if changes needed to be made. The result was that media was not verified until the last step of the quality assurance process, which is me. When I checked all the media, all the content was relating to the way the class was formatted before. All the media and transcripts were wrong. I reported the issue to the media team and it turns out there was never any budget allocated for media for this course.  They ended up having to take  out the media from the entire classroom without having anything to replace it.  They tried to schedule a last minute production for the media but they were not able to have it ready for the term start. This affected the quality of the course, as the videos were an important part of course. The students were not going be able to view the videos and they only had the articles and text book available as resources.

How did the team deal with the issues?  I was upset because it affected my timeline for the course to be ready for copy for the term start; we had to copy the course with only two days for the instructors to access the course. The media team was trying to solve issues but with all the other projects they had it was just impossible to meet the deadline. That is when the decision to take the videos out was made.  If I would have been the project manager I would have ensured that a media specialist was assigned to the project from the start. I am not sure why the resource was not allocated in the first place. I believe that did not even consider the videos since it was an existing course versus a new course. Also it seems like the project manager had so many other projects that she did not pay much attention to this one. The surprising thing is that it went through an Instructional Designer and the instructional designer never even checked the videos to see if they were correct.  The company has a lot of quality assurance systems in place so I think the project manager was not communicating with her team about the course and trying to ensure that everything was running smoothly. If I were a project manager I would ensure that I communicate with entire team on a consistent basis to ensure all bases are covered. 

Our course text also suggests having a change control system in place (Portny, et al., 2008).

 If I were project manager I would ensure that I had a change control system in place for this type of situation.  As a project manager it is important to monitor and control the scope creep and how you respond to the scope creep will either make the project fail or succeed.  In my situation I believe that the students were getting the short end of the stick since they were not going to have the videos for viewing. However they were still going to have to create all the videos at a later time and the budget was going to increase anyway since they never included media in the initial budget.

Portny, S., Mantel, S., Meredith, J., Shafer, S., Sutton, M., & Kramer, B. (2008). Project management: Planning, scheduling, and controlling projects. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.