Program Manager, Enterprise Product on Demand Service (ePODS)
About: National Geospatial Intelligence Agency (NGA) began transforming its mapping, charting, and data management processes from an often outdated, labor- and time-intensive process this program aided in reducing cartographic production time from hundreds of hours to as few as one. The clear success of the project served as an impetus for NGA to modernize nautical and topographic mapping and charting.
I was the Project Manager for this program. I had several customers, who had customers for which these mapping products were being produced. Each release we had competing requirements that had to be balanced. Mitigating "Scope creep" was important as we only had one pot of money, and it had to be used to develop and implement the new mapping product for that release. Each new product introduced a new map and that serviced a different customer. Topographic was for the Army and Marines, Nautical was for the Navy, Aeronautical was for the Air Force or their partners.
I feel as though I did a good job managing scope creep, as each task was tied back to our requirements document/matrix. If it wasn't in there, then it was considered a new requirement and had to go through our Change Control Board (CCB), as well as be impacted against the current requirements and schedule.
At the end of the day, it's all about balance. Balancing requirements against resources, and ensuring your execution matches your plan.
Derrick, I enjoyed reading your post. The closing portion strikes a chord with me. Its reference to plans is also thought and question provoking: Are plans really retrospective in nature, designed for modification especially by virtue of a project's evaluation component? Steve
ReplyDeleteThanks for the comment and question Steve. My answer would be yes. However, when I used the word plan, it was symbolic of schedule, list of task, deliverables, etc. You have to always check execution "what you did" against the plan "what you said you were going to do". This will ensure that you avoid scope creep and/or doing work for which you were not contracted or paid to do. Also plans change, checking actual work against planned work will allow you to make the changes necessary and re-baseline your plan to match the new requirements.
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