When Scope Creep Attacks

A few years ago I worked for an outsourced Human Resources company.  December and January were very busy times of the year for us.  No one was allowed to take off work unless for an absolute emergency.  It was all about preparing for year end and tax time.  Our main focus was to check in with our client base and to make sure they understood everything that needed to be completed in time to process and receive W-2s and tax returns on time.  This process should work seamlessly without any problems as it was something that we did every year.  However, things went wrong.  First of all, the company sent out reminders to clients.  These reminders were put inside their payroll packages on different color paper.  But most of the clients did not see the letter with all the important dates on them.  So needless to say many deadlines were missed and then W-2s were late.  This had a trickledown effect and employees were calling our clients and they were calling us.  And of course with answering all the calls and trying to address everyone’s issues that didn’t leave a lot of time to actually fix the problems.

If I had been in charge of the project I would have handled this much differently.  I think that there can never be too much notice.   It is better to be definitely sure that someone knows something rather than to assume that they do.  I would have sent multiple reminders.  For the ones that went out in advance they could go inside the payroll packages.  However as time got closer, I would have made it a point to send notification via email as well as in a complete separate package all of its own.  Finally I would have had everyone contact their clients directly to speak with them and ask if they had any questions.  It is always better to prepare so that you don’t have to repair.  Communication is key in important situations such as these to make sure that all parties involved have the correct information and understand exactly what they need to do.

Estimating Costs and Allocating Resources

I was able to find two great resources which will both have their benefits to estimating cost and allocating resources.  The first is a list of average/approximate costs that could be used in order to create an estimate.  The second is a spreadsheet that can be used to enter all of the different things that you will need to keep track of in your budget.

Resource 1:     http://tlef.ubc.ca/application-process/cost-estimates/

This site provides a listing of the average costs for several different things that you will need during your instructional design process.  These obviously will not be the exact costs that you will have but they can give you a starting point on which to gage your possible costs.  It is always good to have some sort of baseline comparison when creating your budget.  If you have nothing to compare costs to then you will not know if you are getting  good deal or a bad one.

Resource 2:     http://preweb.clt.odu.edu/price/

This site will allow you to either create an account with them and have your budget calculated for you or download their spreadsheet in order to help calculate the budget yourself.  You could use the spreadsheet they provide in order to organize your costs for your budget.  You could even possibly use some of the cost estimates from resource 1 in order to fill in some of the costs.