Handling Scope Creep

Scope creep is one of the biggest problems a project manager has to deal with.  The availability of new material can be a cause of scope creep or sometimes even new rules and regulations; the end result is that the scope expands and the project manager must determine how to proceed.  Often times, changes may seem small and that they won’t require more time or resources to accomplish but these can grow into larger changes and jeopardize the success of the project if not thoroughly reviewed and evaluated before approval (Portny, Mantel, Meredith, Shafer, Sutton, & Kramer, 2008).

One of the first projects I worked on as a new educator was an upgrade of our e-mail system from GroupWise 5 to GroupWise 5.5.  My role as the educator was to identify the most common current uses of the system and develop the training material, curriculum and provide instructor led classes so the staff would know how to use the system to perform their jobs when we went live.  Well into the project, someone determined that we should also introduce the Document Management feature which allowed shared file storage.  This certainly changed things drastically from a training perspective.  Staff already had existing knowledge of e-mail used in a corporate setting however shared files were pretty much unheard of at that point; the cloud did not exist.  The technicians also needed to build extra servers to accommodate additional files and network security needed to be introduced.  For several weeks, the team really tried to pull it off.  In the end though, there just weren’t enough resources on the project to accomplish the extra goals and objectives associated with document management.  We rolled back to the original project, now with a delayed timeline, and started implementing just the e-mail upgrade.  

Now that I have a bit more experience as a team member and as a project manager, I can

see that this could have been avoided if a change management procedure had been put in
place before any requests for change occurred.  When a project manager is faced with

making a decision, they may feel pressured to give a quick answer and not think thoroughly about all of the consequences (Portny, Mantel, Meredith, Shafer, Sutton, & Kramer, 2008).  A project manager should evaluate change requests closely so they can be analyzed so that impacts to the schedule, cost, or objectives can be clearly articulated and defended to the project sponsor for written approval (Greer, 2010).  By gathering and sharing all of the pertinent information, the stakeholders can choose if the change is worth the impacts it could cause. 

References

Greer, M. (2010). The project management minimalist: Just enough PM to rock your projects! (Laureate custom ed.). Baltimore: Laureate Education, Inc.

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.

Time and Cost Estimates for Instructional Design

As an Instructional designer and new project manager, I haven’t had much experience estimating costs associated with a project.  I have considered the students’ time (usually calculated using an average rate of pay for staff) but I never thought to weigh that against my time and other SMEs time to produce anything resembling ROI (Portny, Mantel, Meredith, Shafer, Sutton, & Kramer, 2008).  I often find myself feeling like there is way too much effort expended on some projects to get the desired result.  I would really like to pop some data into a spreadsheet, let it calculate and know if proceeding with a project is the right thing to do.

I was recently asked to convert a 2 ½ hour instructor led course on nursing documentation in to an asynchronous online course.  In the request, she stated she would be willing to do all the work however; I don’t think she understands the number of hours that will go into this project.  The search for cost estimators I found Big Dog & Little Dog’s Performance Juxtaposition website.  It’s a great Instructions Design site in general but the reason I got excited initially is the development time to instructional time ratios.  Based on their estimates, this course conversion will take approximately 550 hours before we can use it.  Considering we currently hold the class once a month, it will take us until the end of next year to even out the instructor hours we would save.  This is not a sound project, financially speaking.  Since the content is based on software that has quarterly changes, we will likely need to update it before we realize our payback as well.

After searching for more sites with estimators, I came across several others that were close to the 220 hour estimate.  One stood out at a whopping 490 hours for advanced eLearning design and development.  If I use this it would take us about 1225 hours, with an equivalent instructor time at a little over 4 years.  This would surly convince her that this is not a worthwhile use of our time but why the huge disparity?  The Dashe & Thompson Social Learning Blog goes on to explain why instructional designers shouldn’t simply plug a number into a spreadsheet to get a time estimate (like I wanted).  With very large, multi-chapter courses, development time will go down as you progress in the project.  For example, if you need to create 20 chapters the first one will most likely take the longest amount of time.  As you get a system going, you find efficiencies and by the last couple of chapters you spend very little time. 

These are both great sites that I plan to review in more detail; I wish I had found them soon as I think they would have been a great help through some of the other courses in this program.  Hopefully you can also benefit from them. 

References

Clark, D.R. (2010). Estimating Costs and Time in Instructional Design. Retrieved from http://www.nwlink.com/~donclark/hrd/costs.html, June 4, 2014.

Matajcek, J. (2010). Why eLearning Development Ratios Can be Hazardous to Your Career. Retrieved from http://www.dashe.com/blog/elearning/development-ratios-hazardous-career/, June 4, 2014.

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.