This weeks reading introduced us to a concept known as Scope Creep. Scope 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.” (Portny) Scope Creep asks for change in the project without following the proper planning steps and thus is not guaranteed to receive the resources need to succeed. Avoiding scope creep is nearly impossible, but project managers need to understand its there, plan for it, monitor it, and hopefully control it, thus reducing some of the damage it causes.
About four years ago, the middle school that I am a teacher at was named a Priority school, meaning that our state test scores and other factors like attendance fell to the bottom 10% of the state. We received a large grant of money from the state that was intended to turn our school around. All along with this funding, the school also received support in the form of training and supervision of the state. As part of accepting the grant, our school was asked to find new leadership, meaning the principal of 10 plus years was replace with a first time Principal and a first time vice principal.
Now our school saw great change and growth and was even recognized as one of the most improved middle schools in the state. But even with all of the school’s success, things weren’t perfect, and teachers we’re feeling the stress.
Our schools transformation witnessed a heavy amount of Scope Creep. First of all, the track of leadership was very hard to see and thus made it difficult for the lower level project workers, the teachers, to truly understand their role and how the changes were to take effect. You would think the school’s principal would be the project manager in a situation like this but his job was not clearly defined. He had multiple people to answer to, each with their own lists of requests and/or changes that they wanted to see happen. Since there wasn’t a clear line of communication between the state executives who were implementing the changes, the changes had a different feel and look depending at which priority school you visited. And since our Principal was answering to different a number of different state executives, what was needed to be done and when was left up to interpretation. The leadership was so poorly organized, that after the first year, many of those who were in supervisory roles of different regions of schools had to be replaced.
A second challenge of scope creep that we saw in our transformation, was the continuous trainings and seminars that asked teachers to leave the classroom. Not only were teachers repeatedly asked to attend these training during the school year, thus taking them out of the classroom, but they also asked the teachers to implement the changes and learnings the obtained from the training immediately into their classroom practice routines, which caused those budgetary issues that come when extending project without including a change control system.
The lack of leadership not only caused the school to rework how their resources were to be used, it also frustrated the staff to the point that we saw almost half the school’s staff change within the next 3 years, including new building leadership, with both the principal and vice principal leaving for schools in other districts.
