Man, That's Creepy

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.