Have you ever been involved in a project that seemed to get out of control? A few years ago, I worked for a grant program through a college as an advisor for students in middle and high school where I experienced this exact situation. I loved my job and I was happy to always meet every challenge we were given, but one of the challenges seem to grow overnight.
Initially, my boss, who was a fantastic lady, had an idea to bring students to the college campus where we worked. We were going to do the typical college tour where you saw the sample dorm room, walked through the cafeteria, saw the gym facilities, the library, a few classrooms, and have an admissions presentation. The idea was just to pique the interest of our eighth grade students about what a college looks like and what to expect at a community college campus close to home. When they got into high school, they would be able to compare the local campus with a larger university and other private college campuses.
Ideally, we were only going to offer this experience to the eighth students in our grant program at one of the schools where I was the advisor. This was going to be our test school to see how it goes and whether the students got anything out of the visit. We realized many of the students had visited our campus for a variety of reasons prior to this experience so we had to figure out how to make this one more memorable. My boss and I came up with the idea to turn this into an Amazing Race experience on campus. The students would need to go around the campus in teams, gather clues, and complete road blocks, team challenges, and various other tasks. When we pitched the idea to the principal, who had to say it was okay to pull 30 eighth graders out for at least half the day, he was extremely excited, but informed us, due to budget constraints, the school would not be able to help pay for any of the costs. We assumed this and luckily our grant allows us to pay all of the costs for the event and for transportation for our students.
The planning for the event went off without any trouble. Each department and the head of the college were all notified and were ecstatic to help in any way we needed. I like to think of the head of the college as our project champion as he was never called into action, but just knowing he supported our project allowed everyone else on the campus to fall in line. (Portny, Mantel, Meredith, Shafer, Sutton, & Kramer, 2008). Many other individuals on campus offered to be judges, team guides, and manage checkpoints.
A few weeks before the Amazing Race was to commence, I was approached by an eighth grade teacher who heard what we were planning to do with 30 of the eighth graders and he wondered if we would consider involving the entire eighth grade. To say this was going to change the scope of the event would be an understatement. If we were going to include all 200 of the eighth graders we were going to need more resources financially as well as more man power to help coordinate the Amazing Race. Portny et al., (2008) had it stated correctly when they said, “Avoiding scope creep is not possible. However, monitoring it, controlling it, and thereby reducing some of the pain is possible” (p. 347). In this project we did not include a specific change control system, but we were able to deal with all the nuances that came with this scope creep because we got the changes approved in writing by the middle school and the college and we were able to amend all the changes necessary. In successful projects it is also important to “identify project drivers, constraints, and degrees of freedom. Every project needs to balance its functionality, staffing, budget, schedule, and quality objectives. Define each of these five project dimensions as either a constraint within which you must operate, a driver aligned with project success, or a degree of freedom that you can adjust within some stated bounds to succeed” (Wiegers, 1999).
In the end, the school paid for using all buses we needed, allowed the entire 200 eighth grade students to participate in the Amazing Race college campus experience, and helped pay for lunch for the students. Overall it was a successful endeavor, although we may not be including 200 students in any future Amazing Races. We did, however, replicate the Amazing Race college campus experience at our campus for other schools as well as at a few other colleges we visited in the future and all were quite successful.
Looking back on the experience, I do not feel like there was a better way to have dealt with the scope creep of this project. and I learned so much from being a part of the experience. I do not feel that I would have been in the position to tell the school that we did not want to include the entire eighth grade and considering the school was paying for the transportation costs for all the students, it was cheaper in the long run to only provide lunch. The execution of the Amazing Race, however, could have been handled a little smoother with few students per team. When we did the same race with a smaller school each individual student was able to participate more and gain more from the overall experience.
References:
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.
Wiegers, K. (1999, November). Secrets of successful project management. Retrieved from http://www.processimpact.com/articles/proj_mgmt_tips.html
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