Scope Creep is defined as the attempted improvement of a product in the middle of a project (Portny, et. al, 2007). While it is admirable when people are working towards a similar goal and want to make it the best that they possibly can there could be unintended problems such as no one knows what is happening or the project becomes too big to manage.
In my professional life, I am now the offensive coordinator of a high school football team. Four years ago, I was just the offensive line coach and another coordinator was at the head of the offense. It became obvious that we needed a shake up in what we do, and we needed to install a new offense. The five offensive coaches went away together for the weekend and literally locked ourselves into a hotel conference room and tried to install a new offense. The first day we got a ton of work done. We drew up different formations, looked at personnel packages and schemed about different plays that we could run. The second day however, the current coordinator and another coach got off on a tangent of the ability to run one play by blocking a different zone. In theory, if this were to work it would be amazing, but the bottom line is that we are a high school football team, not an NFL team, and there is no way that our players could perform this kind of task. However, since our project leader was DEAD SET that we could pull it off, we spent four hours drawing things out and trying to talk through what ONE PLAY would look like. I left the weekend feeling discouraged and not listened to at all. It was a terrible feeling and one that could have been avoided if we had stayed with the project goals.
If I had been the project manager, which I am now, I would have done a couple of things very differently. First of all, I would not have allowed myself or my staff to deviate from the task at hand. I would have constantly referred back to the objective of the meeting and redirected based on the objective, as I needed to. Most importantly, I would not have allowed myself or others to lead the group so far off task that it was not possible to get back on. As the coordinator I need to lead by example and make sure that the group stays focused on the task at hand.
Reference:
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.
