Managing Scope Creep in a Project I'd Like to Forget!

Scope Creep crept into one of my projects when I was in the Army.  I was assigned as a Platoon Leader in a Signal Corps battalion.   It was my first field exercise in a new platoon.  The platoon’s mission was to lay cable or telephone wire from one field site, in this case for an Armored division (i. e., tanks), to another.  The previous platoon sergeant had managed the platoon very well, but he had returned to “The States.”  The replacement platoon sergeant was excellent, a good administrator, very conscientious.  Unfortunately, he had spent his career as a company clerk.  This was his first time in “the field” since Basic Training.  I successfully read the map and led the platoon to the correct hill, safely negotiating the German Autobahn (we went 35 miles an hour, in convoy, and weren’t too popular with those people who drove without speed limits, but that’s another story).  Both of us understood the basics, deliver cable and wire to the units that needed it, set up communications, and then return to pick up the equipment when they’d gone somewhere else, find that unit again, and repeat the process.

Of course, the mission ballooned and we were told we also had to connect wires to junction boxes in telephone switchboard vans, as well as deliver cable to the vans.  I am sure our troops knew we were “newbies,” but no one said a word to us to let us know that this was Standard Operating Procedure. 

We were unaware that the platoon’s mission included connecting these cables and telephone wires.  This certainly expanded our jobs!  Not only did we have to have tents, our own trucks, vans, signal equipment, food, lights, etc., but we also had to figure out how to make these connections.  We were fortunate in that our own site was the first we had to “wire up.”  Wire up, we did!  We ran telephone wire all over the place connecting individual phones in tents, to everyone else’s tents and into the vans.

What a mess!  It looked like a spider’s web.  The battalion Executive Officer visited us the next day, took pictures, and we never heard the end of it.  I had to see those miserable pictures frequently during my three years in that unit.  I am sure that one of our troops would have stopped us if it had been a more important situation.  Scope Crept up and bit us on the ankles.

How could we have avoided the situation, first, as Dr. Budrovich mentioned in the Laureate Universities Video Program, “Practitioner Voices, You Can’t Win Them All,” (Laureate Universities Video Program, “Practitioner Voices, You Can’t Win Them All,” 2010) be wary when stakeholders are slippery.  It was pretty slippery of our troops to slip quietly into their tents and let us make fools of ourselves!  Second, as Dr. Stolovich would have suggested, we needed both a good planning meeting and we needed to get things in writing (Or in this case, read the manuals!), and third, referring to Dr. Stolovich, again, remembering that not only is a project’s measure of success refer to budget and time line, but if the Project Manager doesn’t lose his or her mind.  (Laureate Universities Video Program, “Managing Projects, 2010)  Well, we went over budget (used up all that wire when we cut and strung), completely blew the time line (we could have slowed down the progress of the whole division field exercise if the situation hadn’t occurred at the outset of the field exercise, and we lost our minds!  (I know that our seasoned troops, squad sergeants, etc., thought it was hilarious.  I hope I never treat new Instructional Designers this way!  I guess it’s normal, however, when my grandfather was in France in World War I, he’d send new soldiers looking for “left handed monkey wrenches.”)

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.

Laureate Universities Video Programs: “Monitoring Projects” and “Practitioner Voices: You Can’t Win Them All"