Analyzing
Scope Creep
A professional project I was involved with that
experienced scope creep was a project with the training and instructional
design department at my work where I was acting as the SME. The project involved the ID/training
department soliciting my input and expertise as the SME for some old training
documents that needed to be updated due to a change in the process that was
outlined in those documents. The new
process indicated that instead of DMT employees emailing information directly
to their co-workers personal Outlook email accounts for verification, the DMT
employees should now email information on documents to a shared role account
through Outlook that had been set up so that there was visibility should
someone be out of the office and not checking their personal Outlook email
account.
The specific scope
issues that we encountered included the fact that the new process that had been
developed didn’t take into account that many employees worked remotely and so
they would need to access the shared role account through signing onto the
network which they were not accustomed to doing due to its unreliable
access. The employees were used to
accessing their Outlook email accounts through webmail. Due to this development, the training/ID
department also needed to address the IT aspect of the project with working
with the employees to figure out how to set up access appropriately and manage
their workflow without interruption.
This additional piece of training and documentation for the project
ended up pushing back many of the anticipated deadlines. At the time, I continued to advise on my
pieces of the project as I could in order to keep up with deadlines but many
essential meetings had to be coordinated around the new developments. If I had been the PM, I definitely would have
taken the time to gather more detailed information on the different types of
employees that were to be affected by the new changes and make sure I knew what
their potential concerns were before mapping out the schedule of the project.
