One of the best contract jobs I’ve ever worked for was working for very famous space agency (SA). I’ve always been a Sci-Fi geek, grew up on Star Trek and Star Wars and any other science fiction shows I could watch. The first documentaries I watched as a kid were space orientated and I watched as many as I could, so it was no surprise that when I got the opportunity to work for SA I jumped at the chance.
I was brought in as an Art Director for a project that would be a 3D educational space exploration game prototype to see if they could get funding for it. Rarely had I ever been this excited. “I get to work for SA…and get paid?!?” I thought to myself. This is a dream come true, and it was. I got to work with some of the most brilliant minds on the planet who were specializing in nanotechnology, physics, engineering, and chemistry. These guys were literally rocket scientists.
We were brought in to meet with the heads of some of the departments about the concept, timeline and what educational elements were supposed to be in it. The game players would use the periodic table, chemistry, and various other real science to solve problems. The only limitations were that the science could be fictitious or too far in the future and there couldn’t be any aliens (since we can’t prove they exist). Essentially, it had to at least be something that’s being worked on currently and not made up.
Scope Creep popped up during the project in a few ways and the project wound up taking over a year to complete instead of the 3 months that was originally planned. The things that caused scope creep were:
- Approval of concept – In a digital project, the first thing is to define what the deliverables are and signing off the concept art. This was the first initial hurdle because the design of the ship couldn’t be finalized. Every concept from the team kept getting feedback which got revisions and would add time to get the final design from the concept artists.
Solution:
The producer/project manager was the one setting the timelines and daily goals. If I could change how this part went down, I would have gotten the stakeholders (SA) to work a lot closer with the concept artists and myself to lock down the design of the ship in the story. This was one of those things that really slowed production and delayed the whole project from getting off the ground. Locking down a date when it’s due and putting in the contract that revisions beyond this point will cost more and delay the completion date would have cleared a lot of problems. - Revolving door – Because people were brought into the team long before they needed to do things, people started losing interest and getting other jobs so we would have to replace them.
Solution:
Because of the timeline issue, people were contracted long before they were needed. The project manager didn’t anticipate the pre-production of the project to take as long and got together a team way too early. If I could do it differently, I would have:- locked down a more accurate timeline coding the priorities instead of being so linear (Laureate. n.d., Monitoring Projects)
- informed members of the potential team, but not brought them in so early. The team lost interest and excitement from waiting so long
- delegated some of the work to other people capable of doing it. Some team members could do more than one thing but were stuck in their particular job for no reason other than that’s what’s on the schedule (Laureate. n.d., Monitoring Projects)
- Change the rules in the last quarter of the game – In a meeting when we were 2 thirds of the completed project, one of the most brilliant scientists decided it would be a great idea to add a lot of things that weren’t originally planned including an extraterrestrial influence. Not only would this change the entire foundation of plausible near future events, it would also include several weeks of adding content and we were already way over our timeline.
Solution:
This one I handled and had jurisdiction on. My team stared at me with a “what do we do?” expression on their faces as we listened to the scientist disclose all of these ideas that we had never heard of. There were now aliens, a love story, and technology that doesn’t exist. It sounded interesting but was totally undoable with the timeline and story we had. I collected myself and addressed the additional information with the scientist. I didn’t want to hurt his feelings and shoot everything down and I really loved his enthusiasm but there was no way of making this happen with the restrictions of time and budget. I told him: “Those were great ideas, but maybe we can save it for a sequel if this project gets off the ground. We want to make sure that we can finish this with the new delivery date”. He agreed and we were able to finish. Later than it was originally planned but it looked better than the original concept and they were very happy with the project.
With all its challenges, this was one of the most fun projects I’ve ever worked on and learned so much on so many levels. I thought I would learn a lot of science (I did) but what I really learned was things to do and not do on a big project.
Resources
Laureate Education, Inc. (Executive Producer). (n.d.). Monitoring projects [Video file]. Retrieved from https://class.waldenu.edu