In my new career as an instructional designer, I have seen a number of issues related to scope creep. Working in the education field can have its share of ups and downs and all elements of my career have their own room for scope creep. Recently I worked as that ISD of a course that was running fairly smooth up until a few weeks prior to the handoff date. The handoff date is the date clearly specified by the project manager at the beginning of the project. Each person who works on the course has a specific date specifically for them. The particular course developer for this course was having a rather difficult time writing the course and her scope began to creep up on here. I had never been through this type of situation so I was just under the assumption that if she was a few days late it would be ok, but I was totally wrong about that!
Portny et al (2008) states scoop creep is the natural tendency of the client, as well as project team members, to try to improve the project’s output as the project progresses. The course developer in this situation did not manage her time as well and ended up having to extend here project period for another week. Portny et al. (2008) states that uncertainty is a lack of sureness that something will come to pass. Her uncertainty jeopardized the status and progression of the entire project because all dates had been approved previously.
The project manager had to step in and negotiate more time for me since I was set to begin my role in the design of the course a week prior. The stakeholders were disappointed that the project fell off schedule but were overall happy that the project manager took the proper steps to assure that the project would still be able to be fulfilled with minor alterations to the course schedule.
As I think back on the situation, if I were the project manager on this project, I would have had weekly status meetings with the management team over the course developers and instructional designers to assure that all aspects of the project were running according to schedule. This would have assured that even if someone was running behind in their role, alterations could have been made prior to the scoop creep period and extra days could have possibly been scheduled in for situations such as this.
Reference:
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.
