Project creep

Scope creep can be defined as, “the natural tendency of the client, as well as project team members, to try to improve the project’s output as the project progresses” (Portny, Mantel, Meredith, Shafer, Sutton, & Kramer, 2008).  After reading this definition I am reminded of many projects I have been involved with in the field of secondary education.  The part of the definition that most grabs me is the part about project team members.  The scope of a project can definitely change when you get a group of dedicated and talented educators in a room together and the ideas start to fly.

One example of this occurred towards the end of my tenure at my first teaching job.  I had worked for that district for over five years as a social studies teacher and had worked well with a few other teachers who started around the same time.  The high school used to have a travel club that created overseas travel opportunities for students.  The club disbanded before I started at the school when the teacher who oversaw it for many years retired.  Certain groups in the school traveled, but they were always tied into a content area or class and we felt it was important to offer travel opportunities that were not tied to a specific club or class.  I and three other teachers from other departments set out to bring back the travel club.

We started by getting approval from the building principle who was an enthusiastic supporter of student opportunities, although he was not one to help define projects and preferred to get projects handed to him that were completely defined and ready to go.  With his tentative approval to move forward we contacted the retired teacher who used to run the travel club.  We visited him afterschool and he gave us all kinds of inspirational stories of student travel.  He was still in touch with many students from his three decades of teaching and many of those relationships were through travel.

Excited by the retired teachers successes we met again to try and create an outline for how the club would operate.  By this time the school board had been informed of our plans and while supportive they added a lot of expectations we were not prepared for.  Some suggestions were obvious such as code of conduct expectations and liability, but others were not.  A big stumbling block was that all trips needed to connect to learning.  This was puzzling since our initial goal was to revive a club that had travel as its central theme and not a connection to a class or club.  Through some emails we tried to explain that the club needed to be free from connected learning to a class, the trip itself was the experience.  

In the meantime, our group discussed funding ideas, destinations, as well as ways to create learning standards.  Our principle wanted us to finalize the club details before the spring so it could be featured as part of a transition night that showcased the different clubs and activities at the school.  Very quickly our project idea moved from the initial feasibility phase to a club that needed to justify its existence as well as present evidence of what it did to parents and students.  In a few short weeks the scope of this project expanded far faster than we were prepared to deal with.

I wish I could say we managed the increased scope of the project and revived the travel club, but the pressure of our principle to produce something combined with the school board’s insistence on tying travel to state standards proved too much, too fast.  On a positive note I learned that as the head soccer coach I could create travel opportunities for my team, but by leaving it open to any interested students I circumvented state rules about having contact with my players out of season.  In my second to last year at that school I took a group of 17 high school students, most of them soccer players, to England for a week during our spring break.  Besides exploring London, a city I had visited multiple times before, we saw two soccer matches.  It was a great experience and I am still in touch with some of those students who I traveled with. 

Looking back on the project I would have done a few things different.  First, as a group we never elected a project lead.  A strong leader would have moved things along.  Also, since we did not have a lead we were receiving different communication from the board and our principle.  Next, we started with the final product and tried to work backwards.  A better approach would have been identifying what the procedure and expectations were in a more chronological order.  As we ran into roadblocks that did not fit our image of what the travel club would be we stalled out and lost momentum.   Finally, we should have defined the project before presenting our idea to the principle and the board.

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.