Scope Creep

As a teacher, I have been a part of a project that involved scope creep.  Since many states are adapting their curriculum to the Common Core Standards, the district I have been teaching in for six years decided to implement these standards early to see if there were any glitches.  They asked k-2 grade teachers to begin implementing these first and then add 3-8^th this school year.  The curriculum committee put together materials and a scope and sequence for primary teachers and we received these new adoptions the week before the school year started.  I was overwhelmed at first because I had to develop lessons that aligned with these new standards.  They broke the standards down into quarters and asked us to implement them right away.  There wasn't much professional development training, so a team of teachers got together and dissected the new scope and sequence and devised a long term plan for the year.  There were some hurdles to overcome and adjustments that needed to be made.  A part of the plan was for administration to observe teachers using these standards within their lesson plans.  I actually came across an issue when I was teaching math.  Apparently I taught a lesson on place value using standards from the second quarter, which we were still in the first quarter of the school year.  Administration quickly brought up the issue and I corrected it immediately and we moved on.  By the end of last school year, K-2 successfully implemented the common core standards and student test scores increased by at least 10%.  Looking back, if I were an administrator I would have created more resources that aligned with the Common Core Standards.  One issue that many teachers faced was the lack of resources to use when teaching to these new standards.  Many of us had to create our own resources that took a lot of time and effort to make our lessons successful.  This year they invested in a new curriculum for math that aligns exactly with the new standards and is functional and easy for students to understand.

Estimating Costs and Allocating Resources

This week we read about creating project schedules as well as estimating costs and allocating resources. As a project manager it's essential to create a schedule that is conducive to the overall objectives of the project as well making sure every task stays on schedule. We were asked to research different websites and search engines to locate resources that would be helpful to project managers when estimating costs for a project. I have included two websites that I found that can be useful to project managers that help define estimating costs and strategies they can use to make their projects more successful.

 
Clark, D. (2010). Estimating costs and time in instructional design. Retrieved from http://www.nwlink.com/~donclark/hrd/costs.html.

 
This website outlines creating budgets and estimating costs for companies. It gives you examples of companies and how they allocated their costs to fit within a certain budget. It gives you an itemized list of costs for specific items for training and development time. It also lists a schedule for each specific course and the time frame it should take to complete the training. This is a great example of how a project manager should conduct a project and the right steps to thrive at a project.

 
Greer, M. (2009). Estimating instructional development (ID) time. Retrieved from http://michaelgreer.biz/?p=279 .


This website was constructed by Greer, who also published one of our text books for EDUC 6145, The Project Minimalist.  He always outlines important details to include in an instructional design project and ideas of how to create your own.  There were a few ideas that stuck out, that I hope to use when creating my own project.  They were:

1.  He discusses the ratio development time vs. training time and what ratio is the most efficient.  The ratio he discusses that is the most useful is 10:1 or 30:1.  He said that it varies from project to project and from company to company.  He said what matters the most when estimating the development time is the instructional development model you will be using (Greer, 2009).  Your model should account for all activities you will perform, which would be called your "non-writing."

 
2.  Deliverables would be different from one project to another.  One course may be instructor led, whereas another course could include videos or interactive simulations within the training course.  It depends on the instruction that is being presented as well as the overall outcome of that particular project. 

 
Basically, he said to not trust the ratios that have worked for other projects unless they include the same instruction, same outcome and the same people throughout the course and project.