Some Background
In early December of 2011, an email went out to every middle
school teacher in the district. The
email was a search for middle school science teachers who would be willing to
serve on a district wide committee that would be responsible for choosing the
new middle school science resources for the district. The district secondary learning specialist,
the math intervention-learning specialist, and the district school technology
specialist would lead the committee. The
committee would be comprised of two science teachers from each middle school. Ideally,
each school would have enough teachers that an application process would take
place and teachers would be selected from the application pool. As it would turn out, only one teacher from
my school volunteered to be on the committee, which still left one more person
that would need to volunteer from my department. When I proposed this to my department at our
monthly meeting, there was no interest.
So being the department chair, I went ahead and volunteered to be the second
representative.
Some More Background
The expectation for teachers who are part of this committee
would be several days off the floor in order to take part in committee
activities. These activities would
include defining criteria of the resources to review, narrowing the resource
publishers to no more than four by the end of December, review of resources and
publisher presentations, and a recommendation of the chosen resource to the
school board by the first week of April 2012.
Creeping up.
This project experienced several different forms of scope
creep. The first began after the second
meeting in Mid December. At the end of
the second meeting, the teachers voted and approved a group of four publishers
who would present their resources in mid January. The scope creep occurred when our project
manager informed us that two other publishers, who were not part of the
original review, would be added to the presentations for review in mid
January. Because of the extra publishers,
a second day of review and presentations would be necessary in order to gather
needed information.
The second instance of scope creep occurred at the end of
the second day of presentations and review.
At this time, the committee narrowed the choice down to two different
publishers. One that was technology
based, and the other that took a more project based approach to science
instruction. At this time, the committee
was asked by the committee leaders to pilot one group of resources or the other
in order to gather data that could then be shared with the group in a meeting
that would take place in early February of 2012. This would add a considerable workload to the
members of the committee, as they would need to incorporate these resources
into lessons that had already been planned and designed.
A third occurrence of scope creep took place when the
committee met in February. Despite the
intention to pilot the resources, some teachers did not receive the resources
from one of the publishers in a timely fashion.
As a result, a few of the committee members could not provide the
feedback that was requested at the January meeting. To go along with this, the committee leaders
were informed by the head of the district learning services that the committee would
need to do a full alignment comparison of each resource to the new state
standards. In the end, this alignment
would mean yet another day off the floor, and would add yet more time to our
timeline. Already it was becoming
obvious that we would not be able to meet the original district deadline of
early April.
Two final instances of scope creep would occur once we were
finally able to complete the standards alignment comparison, and make the recommendation. The first came once the recommendation had
been made by the committee. It was at
this time we were informed we would need to take a much larger role in the
presentation of our recommendation to the school board. Originally, we were informed that all we
would need to do was make our recommendation.
The school board revised this, because on the initial presentation by
the committee leaders, the board decided they wanted to be able to question
committee members and gain a greater understanding of our thinking behind the
recommendation. The second instance
would come when our presentation was bumped from the meeting in early May to
the end of May due to other district business.
In the end, our recommendation was approved over a month later than
originally projected.
Hindsight is 20/20
From my perspective, I am not sure most of the scope creep
could have been avoided. I really feel
like the project manager did an above average job of monitoring the project (Portny,
Mantel, Meredith, Shafer, & Sutton, with Kramer, 2008) and trying to stay
ahead the inevitable scope creep. One
might point to the addition of the two publishers as avoidable scope creep,
however it would turn out the recommendation by the committee would turn out to
be one of the resources that was added late in the review process. As far as the other scope creep that
occurred, those were instances that came from outside influences such as district
superiors, school board requests, and the state department of education. In the end, one change that could have been
made in order to reach the original deadline would have been to start the
process sooner. The original delivery
date of early April was going to be tight even without any type of scope
creep. Starting the process sooner seems
like a logical, but it is unknown whether the leadership team was available to
begin the project process sooner.
References
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.
