In preparation for the roll out of the one-to-one device initiative in my school district, I was trained to be a digital leader that would manage the digital team at my school. For this project to be successful, I had to create a timeline of multiple training sessions for staff and students that would roll out before the beginning of the next school year. My team met twice a month for training to be digital trainer sessions and twice a month to prepare our digital training curriculum for our staff.
After several months of work and with the project prepared to launch the curriculum, we attended a digital trainer session where the district lead announced that their district team put together the curriculum, presentations and materials for our school based staff development trainings. We were told this was an idea from one of our school board members who believed it would be best to have one training across the entire district. My team and I were dumbfounded by this new development. We spent months preparing our own curriculum, presentations and material that we knew would work best with our staff and school culture. Our principal was upset by the news after all the time and work we put into the project only to be overridden by a school board member.
My team met with the school’s administration team to discuss the changes, reviewed the details from the district and scrambled to rewrite all our timelines, grouping of staff and reviewed the training materials. We only had a couple of weeks to prepare before rollout. I spent countless hours making corrections in the curriculum and training materials. We truly floundered at the beginning of our instructional training as there was just not enough time for us to adjust to the new material for us to teach confidently.
Looking back at this now, there were things that could have been handled differently to better manage this scope creep. I believe my team should have taken the time to merge our training curriculum and material together so it would best suit our school culture. This would have allowed the team the confidence of knowing what they were doing when conducting a staff development digital training. I also believe it would have been beneficial if we asked for a push back on the district timeline so all the teams could feel better prepared to handle the changes. This was an unexpected change that left us feeling flustered. We should have step back and looked at the bigger picture which would have shown us how having districtwide uniform trainings kept us all on track. It was a lesson learned of how scope creep could shake the very foundation of a project.
