Week 6 Blog Assignment - Trouble With Creeps

Get Away From Me You Creep!

     Our text defines scope creep 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 and Kramer, 2008, p. 346).  I have had personal encounters with a few creeps that have changed the scope of my project at the time.  Allow me to explain what happened in one particular instance.

Over ten years ago, I use to work for an inner city youth ministry in town.  We were getting ready to launch a new mentor program where we paired a business professional with a high school youth from our program.  The goal was that we wanted our youth to finish school strong and be better equipped for college and life as a working professional. We wanted our program to focus on quality more than quantity.  We felt as if we could make a more substantial impact in these young individuals if we kept our numbers small.  What we did not want to happen was to try and add mentors to too many of our high school youth that we loose touch with the program.  We did not want to just be going through the motions, we wanted these business professionals to not only spend time with these youth outside of school, but to also urge them to do better in school and help prepare them for life after school as a professional.  We wanted quality above all else.

     “Project managers must expect change and be prepared to deal with it” (Portny, Mantel, Meredith, Shafer, Sutton and Kramer, 2008, p. 346).  I must say that we were not prepared at all for the change that was about to happen.  About a month before the mentor program was launched, we had a last minute donor who wanted to donate a substantial amount of money to this program.  Once he heard that we were starting the program with only 10 high school youth, he said that we would not be doing enough.  He went onto say that if he donated the large sum of money that he wanted us to use that money to increase our initial number from 10 to 30 high school youth.  This was a major concern because we needed the money, but we also knew that we needed to keep our numbers low.  We really had a dilemma on our hands.

     We proceeded with caution.  We first met with the donor and compiled a detail report and presentation of our current mentor program structure.  We went over all of the pros and cons of increasing our number from 10 to 30 high school students.  We really tried our best to make a case that we appreciated and needed his support, but at the same time we wanted him to realize that we could not increase our numbers so high at the beginning.  Together, my team and the donor were able to make a mutual agreement that we would take his donation and increase our initial number to 15 students with the hopes of growing it by 5 students every year for the next several years until we begin to see that the system we have is working as intended and we are able to handle the increased load of high school students.  The donor was very satisfied with the agreement and looked forward to being a part of this ministry opportunity.

     Even looking back on this particular example, I do not really see anything we could have done differently.  We made a good case and came to a mutual agreement that we could grow upon.  We truly felt that the solution we garnered was the most effective solution to date.  There is nothing I would change about how we handled it.  In the end, this particular donor helped us by donating more funding and resources to this mentor program.  So the changes we made to suit his wants ended up helping us more in the long run than initially expected.  Today, the same program that started with only 15 high school students has branched out to other locations to include more than 150 high school students.  This would have not been possible without the help of the donor in question and the agreement and compromise we made years ago.

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.