A professional project that experienced issues related to scope creep that I participated in was a 3 day summer professional development session for a middle school leadership team. This series of PD sessions was created by my office to train the new instructional leadership team (ILT) on addressing the needs of the adolescent learner.

Specific Scope Creep Issue:
• As we developed the project in the late Spring of the year, it became necessary to make changes to the content and the format for delivery. These changes created stakeholder stress in that the original content of the delivery was one that had been delivered previously for another school and now based on data collected from the newly hired team members, we found that the original content was not the content that would meet the needs of the learners. An adjustment needed to be made 4 weeks before delivery date.

How Issue was Addressed:
• Our team members researched the previous school locations of newly hired teachers (who had transferred from other local schools) to determine their PD history, which helped us to determine their current needs. This was not an original problem when the training was determined for the original team members. It was not until the new principal was hired and a massive turn over in leadership took place, that we realized the need to do another assessment to determine if we were on track for the current needs of the new team. This caused a major change in design, time to design, stress level and personnel in order to make the necessary changes within the next 4 weeks. A training of this level for 3 days is a major project if done properly. In preparation, our team collaborated and went from a team of two people to four people. Everyone jumped into the project with assigned roles and got the work done.

What Could Have Been Done Differently?
• To control the scope of the project the design and delivery team might have communicated with the upper leadership to anticipate any changes in school leadership staff before initial decisions on content and delivery. The knowledge and experiences of the participants were key for this training, so being pro-active in determining their needs was extremely important.