Sedat Cilingir's Blog

Scope creep (also called requirement creep) in  project management refers to uncontrolled changes in a project’s scope (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scope_creep).  Of course, there is always the possibility to come across with some issues
which may prevent the smooth flow of a project, but the number of these issues may be decreased by defining, documenting and controlling the project from the  very beginning to the end. However, the risk of scope creep always exists  (Portny, 2008).

I remember a project we were working on last summer about launching a new English Placement  test for the new university student who will study English preparatory program. We made all our preparations; we found a new placement test, tried it, and made a decision to use it with the new coming students. The test consisted of reading, listening and writing sections. The day before the exam, as routine procedures, we packed all the exams and tried all the cd’s which will be used in the exam the day after. While doing that we suddenly realized we could not use the CDs on our tape recorders. We used to have CDs for this type of exams, and teachers would take them to the classrooms and used them during the exam
with Exam CDs. There were 50 classes which would take the exam, and all of the CDs were useless. Since it was our first trial of the test, we could not find out why they did not work. Then, we realized that the CDs which were supplied to us were in MP3 format, and unfortunately they were not suitable for our tape recorders. The new launch of the placement test was about to fail tragically because at first we could not understand the problem itself. Then, with the help of technical staff, we managed to duplicate all of the CDs in the audio format.

It was a small issue to overcome considering the whole project (finding a placement, alpha testing, making the minor adjustments on it, beta testing, etc.), but it was a risky situation for all of us, and it was difficult to foresee it. As a team, we came across with an unexpected situation but the communication and a good planning helped us overcome it.

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.

“The expense isn’t what it costs to train employees. Its what it costs not to train them. You realize that as you grow.” Gary Wilber, CEO of Drug Emporium, Inc.

‘In addition to the planning the technical aspects of project plans (how the work will get done and by whom), project managers also need to spend time on another important element of planning – establishing a project budget, the financial plans for allocating organization resources to project activities’ (Portny, 2008). For an Instructional Designer or a Project Manager, it is always necessary to find support from other sources. Below are two resources which may be helpful for the Project Managers who will be dealing with budgeting process.

Big Dog & Little Dog’s Performance Juxtaposition @ http://www.nwlink.com/~donclark/hrd/costs.html

In the web site, the basic information about budgeting and why Project Managers need a good budgeting for an Instructional Desig Project. The site also gives some basic training cost and time samples for various components ranging from power point presentation to student guide to
interactive learning modules. The web site continues with case studies to exemplify some Instructional Design Project budgeting.

The eLearning Coach @ http://theelearningcoach.com/category/business/

ELearning Coach is a comprehensive and very useful web site which tries to give tips to professionals who are working in the field of Instructional Design. One of the sections is ‘Business’, and there are several articles which may help the ID or PM to deal with some difficulties in project budgets and planning. ’10 Ways to Protect yourself from From Client Issues’ or ‘How to Avoid Project Failure’ are some of those articles.

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.

 E-mail

The message is delivered in a very formal and kind way in that the receiver sees a friendly approach to what is requested. The ‘I’ language is more obvious in the e-mail rather than ‘you’ language which may make the receiver feel offended. By the sender, it is highlighted that the sender needs the receiver, so the receiver will probably help the sender. On the other hand, since there is no sound or facial or

Voicemail

He message is similar to the e-mail. It has a friendly tone and the tonality makes the message more personalized comparing to the first e-mail message. The advantage of the voice mail is that the speaker adds her tone to arrange the intimacy of the message.

Face to Face conversation

This time, the same message is given face-to-face which makes the message the most personalized. The smiling face of the speaker and the intimacy she has makes the message even much friendlier, and not a business requirement but even a friendly request. Facial expressions accompanying the message support the friendly request of the speaker.

Comments

As it is obvious from three modalities of communication, when voice and body expressions are included in the message, the way people receive the message is more and more personalized. As Dr. Stolovitch states in his video presentation, communication is not only words and approximately 93 % of communication is carried out not through words, so a good communication is well defined by spirit and attitude, tonality and body language, timing and the personality  of the recipient (Stolovitch, 2011)

 References

Video Program: Dr. Stolovitch, “Communicating with Stakeholders”, Laureate Inc.

The project was a translation project that we did for a medical company in which we missed the deadline and failed in the quality of work. We could not deal with the project as a team in our office. There were 4 people in our office including myself, all working as translators. We were working full time, and besides the project we started, there were daily duties for all us and they needed to be taken care. The project was about the translation of an annual report, and there were almost 1000 pages to be translated from Turkish to English for foreign partners of the company. Since the company had an annual meeting to be held soon, we had very limited time. When we agreed on the basics of the work to be done, we immediately started to look for some more translators to work for us. Since it was impossible to finish the project in such a short time, we planned to hire new translators. Having used our connections in the market, we found 4 more translators and sent some sections of the report to them. We also started to work on the project while doing the other routines of our office. Two days before the deadline, we were expecting all the sections back to compile them together and review the translation in a day or so before submitting it to the company. What happened in the end was that two of the out-of-the-office translators submitted their work on the deadline which gave us no time to review and edit, the other two caused a lot of troubles in terms of vocabulary used in the translation because we had not done any standardization sessions to have a coherent and standard language. So we failed.

Under the light of what we have learnt in the course Project Management in Education and Training so far, there are a couple of things I would like to underline about why we failed in the end. First of all, although the work and the scope of the project was not that big, it required a serious project planning because we were expecting an outcome in the end (the translation to be submitted to the company) using the resources at hand (translators, information,  etc) in a scheduled time (start and end dates) (Portny, 2008). First of all, maybe due to the market conditions, we had no chance but to accept the work within the limited time frame. On the other hand, we haven’t written a kind of SOW to inform all the participants about the project. Since SOW is written confirmation of what a project will produce and the terms and conditions under which the project team will perform the work. Since we did not launch a SOW none of the participants, especially those who worked out of the office, could get the basic information such as the purpose, objectives, constraints and assumptions of the whole project.  Another factor of our failure was about the structure of the organization. Since we had to choose people outside the company, they were not familiar to each other’s styles and knowledge as stated in matrix organizational structure. Also, there was a clear lack of focus on project team and its goals, as opposed to each person’s individual assignment (Portny, 2008). While looking at the phases of a project, it seems that we were more successful in the first three phases (conceive, define and start phases) but the last two phases were more problematic (perform and close). At the start phase, also, we did not use the work breakdown structures efficiently, and in the problematic stages, we did not receive any feedback that could show us possible problems, so in the end, we had no time to take the client’s approval for the close-up.  

Al in all, since we could not follow some fundamental stages of a project preparation and process, it ended up  with failing the project which damaged our reputation as a translation office. Some careful analysis of the work and a little bit more attention to the needs and what we had at hand would lead the project to work better.

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.

Hello myclassmates. I will be using my blog from the previous terms for the Project Management, too. Wish you all a fruitful term.

Sedat