Greer, (2010), says that "scope change may be defined as any addition, reduction, or modification to the deliverables or work process as outlined in the original project plan". He also writes that scope changes “can be beneficial when they allow the project team to respond sensibly to changing conditions that exist outside the project.” These statements are typically apply to one of my professional experiences that took place two years ago. Let me explain to you what happened to me just the other day when I was a project manager for a training program. The program major stakeholders were the drilling training unit manager as the program primary approval and the supervisor of the real-time operation center as a mentor. The program original scope was to train 10 fresh petroleum engineers to have enough theoretical and practical knowledge in order to be able to run the customer real-time operation center. Program duration was 18 months including online and instructor lead courses, field training, specialized technical office training and a hands on real-time operation center practical training.
In cooperation with the customer training unit manager, I have prepared a program presentation that could be considered as a Statement of Work (SOW), but it we never had a formal signed agreement. Obvious conflicts between the stakeholder parties ring a loud bell in my head from the first meeting and I anticipated troubles and lots of major changes that soon appeared on the surface including:
· Reducing the number of engineers from 10 to start with four then add three more after two months.
· The engineers are not really fresh graduates and with different levels of experience.
· Reducing the field training period from three months to two weeks.
· Cancelling the office technical training sessions.
· Refusing to run the engineers’ hands-on practical training in the customer real-time center and asking me to come up with an alternative, so I used my company's.
· The engineers are not really fresh graduates and with different levels of experience.
· Reducing the field training period from three months to two weeks.
· Cancelling the office technical training sessions.
· Refusing to run the engineers’ hands-on practical training in the customer real-time center and asking me to come up with an alternative, so I used my company's.
· Negotiating the necessity of each online and instructional led course and cancel whatever is possible.
· Finally I was obliged to graduate any the engineers as soon as he can partially handle the job.
Simply the project scope was continuously evolving and changing from time to time, and as a project manager I had to think of a way out in order to accommodate these changes. Initially, when I had four engineers with different levels of experience to start the program with, I realized that we are not going to stick to the program anymore and I discussed the issue with the customer who asked me to do whatever we can to graduate those engineers as soon as possible. In spite of all hectic situations of this project, the project was considered a successful one as we managed to help the customer and develop an evolving program with less demanding objectives based on the customer request and we ended up graduating all engineers within seven months. My experience indicates the exact definition of the Scope creep when my project grew in scale and complexity with more individuals got involved. This also confirms Portny et al. (2008), definition of scope creep as “the natural tendency of the client, as well as project team members, to try to improve the project output as the project progresses”.
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.
