My experience with scope creep occurred a few years ago when I was working as a graphic designer at an event planning company. The company was planning a women’s convention. My role for and during the conference was to create the program, a PowerPoint that would run during the fashion show and through the conference, and to sit at the door and sale tickets. Little did I know that I would soon end up donning a head set and running around taking care of a majority of all the behind the scenes work and more for a conference with little to no budget.
A majority of the problems consisted of poor planning, lack of a budget, and an inattentive owner. I and three others had to pretty much take over her responsibility. I had to deal with vendors and talent whose needs were not being met and ticketing and security issues. These people were promised a lot of things that I had no knowledge of (because I was only in charge of the program design and selling tickers) but yet I had to find a way to somehow accommodate them. The programs were supposed to be in color and there were only 50 of them for 200 people and the videographer was MIA. A fight broke out. There wasn’t enough A/V equipment for the demos and the venue was too large so they could hear over the fashion show that was going on. It’s a long list of issues. And where was the owner?? Sitting on her butt watching it all.
A lot of thing could’ve been to make sure these issues never happened. For the resources that were available, I and the three other people handled our situations well. Like I stated before, this all could have been avoided if proper steps had been taken for planning and budgeting, creating a contingency plan, and if the person in charge had taken been a bit more proactive. Portny et al (2008) states that project managers should identify risks, assess potential impacts, develop plans for mitigations, and monitor that risk status, and keep others informed. Since I had been thrown into the mix, I felt I had to do all of these steps in a matter of minutes. This event was definitely a lesson in risk management. Everything that could’ve gone wrong did go wrong. But the good thing about was that the convention attendees didn’t know.
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.
