In an example of scope creep from my own personal experience I would like to highlight a recent event planned at my former job. In my former job, at times we were asked by our supervisor’s to plan sale events in our downtime or in periods when sales are running low. Alex, a co-worker of mine, came up with an idea for a sales event at one of our local universities during the school’s homecoming weekend right on campus. Alex was so excited about the event that we all bought into it and assigned him as lead on this project. So in turn Alex assigned specific duties to everyone with the hopes of this event becoming a huge success.
After each person was given their role and assigned their duties we set off to begin our planning. There was roughly two weeks to plan and implement the event. The duties assigned were someone in charge of inventory, someone in charge of acquiring the mobile equipment needed, another person in charge of food and refreshments, and Alex handled acquiring the location-getting permission from the school, and on campus advertisement. The day of the event came and everything was set perfectly according to the responsibilities we agreed upon in the beginning but little interest actually came to the event. A few college students participated but we didn’t see any alumni after all it was homecoming weekend.
Afterwards, everyone gathered to try to gain an understanding of what went wrong. One by one we went down our responsibility list and check off everything we did. Alex was last and he was able to check off everything on his to do list. Then all of a sudden one of my co workers stated to Alex “ Do you think things would have turned out differently if you advertised outside of campus and into the community ?” That became a valid question which made sense especially considering the only time the alums would be on campus would be during events. Afterwards Alex apologized, because that was a factor that he did not consider.
I believe this situation taught all of us to take more time to carefully plan our events and try to take every consideration under advisement. More importantly, we learned to be more critical of each others duties when we planned events from that point on.