I
have had moderate success so far in my new job with a task that is still a work-in-progress.
During the planning and implementation of this project I made two mistakes. The
first was, I failed to create a statement of work because of my lack of experience
or training in project management, and the second was allowing one of the
project’s main stakeholders to set an unrealistic deliver time for the task’s
completion.
The
task or project came about as a request to identify and introduce a content management
system (CMS) to teachers in a PK-12 school. Teachers needing to create an
online presence in their classrooms had introduced various online resources like
wikis, blogs and instant messaging applications to enhance their teaching
content. This innovation on the part of the teachers, caused parents with
multiple children in the school to have to log into many different websites to
monitor and assist their children with learning. Parents who were time-strapped
and less computer literate complained to school administrators about this issue,
and requested one point of entry to their children’s online environment. The
purpose of the CMS therefore was to provide one portal to learning for teachers,
students, parents and administrators.
A
statement of work (SOW) would have made the implementation of the project less pressuring
to me the project manager. The SOW would have outlined to the stakeholders what
the project would produce and the terms and conditions under which the project
would be carried out. Because this document was not created the stakeholders
had unrealistic expectations of the delivery time for the project. The CMS was
successfully implemented and is in use, but the implementation took longer than
the stakeholders expected.
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.
Pat, I identified the same problem with my project! I didn't know about SOW's so we planned our project rather informally and it came back to bite me in the end! It is so important to plan! Now having completed one SOW (even though it's for an imaginary project), I feel confident I will be able to do this in the future and keep my projects on track. It's nice to know I'm not the only one who has learned the lesson the hard way. ;-)
ReplyDeleteCheers,
Lesley
Hi Patricia
ReplyDeleteYour project sounds like an interesting and ambitious endeavor. You wrote “This innovation on the part of the teachers, caused parents with multiple children in the school to have to log into many different websites to monitor and assist their children with learning. Parents who were time-strapped and less computer literate complained to school administrators about this issue, and requested one point of entry to their children’s online environment”. In Practitioner Voices: Overcoming “Scope Creep”, Ms. Achong discussed the importance of identifying all relevant stakeholders; reminding project managers to make sure all of the people who need to involved have been identified and are included in throughout the process, she noted “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure”. Based on the project scenario you outlined, it appears that a key stakeholder to this project was the parents as end users of the CMS; yet there is no indication that the parents were included in the planning phase of the project. I agree with your assertion that a statement of work would have been a helpful resource for this project by managing stakeholder expectations; and potentially the parents would have been identified as stakeholders as well which could have changed how the CMS was initially designed.
Heather
Reference
Laureate Education, Inc. (Producer). (2009). “Practitioner Voices: Overcoming “Scope Creep””. [Video Podcast]. Baltimore, MD: Author.
Pat,
ReplyDeleteCongrats on your new job!! This is what I would love to do & hope to one day soon. This is what I envision myself doing. Sorry to hear you had a few bumps in the road. But like you said, it's "still a work-in-progress." (Watkins. Learning from a Project “Post-mortem”. Nov. 2013) Creating a SOW would have been beneficial & might not have had the stakeholders delayed. Good luck.
Cheryl