Analyzing Scope Creep

My organization is contracted by the state, (our stakeholder), to handle a very large population of welfare cases. Both of these components in it-self brings on many different issues. There is always a new standard operational procedure (SOP) that is incorporated or changed, which could bring chaos to the workflow at any given time. Once a new SOP is established and is just working for the participant, a revised one comes into play. This causes all sorts of problems with consistency and structure.


About a few months ago, the organization stated that because our stakeholder increased rate percentages we had to do several projects to bring up our numbers. You see the sad thing about this situation with my organization or any organization, especially one that has to make a profit, is the numbers are sometimes more important than the time one puts into helping a person. This cannot be controlled as that is how the organization gets paid. If the numbers are not up the organization does not get paid and the worker does not get a good grade on the quarterly progress report.

Anyway, the stakeholder, during a corporate meeting told my organization that instead of reaching 30% for one type of funding participant and 60% for the other type of funding participant, the totals will now be 45% and 75%. It sounded as if the stakeholder was trying to get us to fail, as we (all staff) had a hard time even reaching the original percentages of 30 and 60. A lot of the low percentages in our unit were not in our control. If the participants failed the program we failed. We each had too many cases and not enough time on our hands. Mistakes were easy to make as each 8 hour day was rushed so as to cram the vast amount of work in and still try to make our numbers. Talk about a juggling act.

A project was created to try and lesson the mistakes that we as case managers made with the idea that we would put our attention on the participants, helping them every step of the way so that they are continuously monitored and pushed to meet expectations. When a person has 100 cases, this task is not that easy, especially when you have mandatory training, corporate meetings, new projects on top of other projects already introduced. Operation Sweep was a project in which we took our cases and combed through them for any errors or potential problems. We had 1 month to do it all while conducting are normal flow of work and new participant’s that came in. We tried to keep on schedule, however new SOPs and state mandatory compliance training came up all within the same month. The scope of our project moved out a couple of weeks but we did what we had to do. We corrected many of the cases that were going to go for review before the state and we are continuing to use the rubric to guide us on upcoming cases so that mistakes are to a minimal. Suresh states, “scope creep” is always a change or growth of project scope. Instead of preventing the changes, we should work as a team to effectively manage the changes by not affecting the project timelines and budget (Suresh, B., 2005). The question now is, does doing this stressful project that was behind schedule and cost overtime for employees bring up our numbers? We can only wait and see.

Resource:

Suresh, B., 2005. Scope Creep Management. Retrieved on December 8, 2011 from http://www.projectperfect.com.au/info_scope_creep_mgmt.php