After Saturday’s class and the teams’ status reports, I found myself reflecting on my team’s project status with an increased critical eye.

I found myself pondering about how our simple Face the Future Foundation and Potbelly’s event grew to the event, a cookie sale, and an office jeans day; while most teams, if not all, are just putting on an event. Talk about scope creep! Our project nearly tripled in tasks when the additional ideas were added. In most situations, scope creep can be horrible to a project; however, our scope increased by design and our group had control of the scope at all times.

While you read this you may think I sound like I am justifying what our group decided, but I stand by my opinion that we allowed the scope to increase due to one important fact: team size. Our team is comprised of seven team members when the average team size of the other groups is five. At the beginning of the project, I was excited about having the extra hands and minds to accomplish the event; however, I now know that my excitement was a rookie thought that was quickly replaced with the knowledge that an increased team size does not always equal more success.

The large team has been great so far except for the simple fact that because our team number grew to seven, our performance expectations also grew. Therefore, our group decided that we needed to work at guaranteeing a higher amount of donations. Not wanting to put all of our eggs into one basket, we decided to branch out and add more components to our fundraising event. Ipso facto: a cookie sale and an office jeans day.

With the decision to increase the scope of the project, our team is attempting to mitigate the risk of a low donation amount as well as increase chances of success. Sounds too good to be true, right? Well, hopefully not. At this point, we have not had any major adverse effects from having a large project team besides having to increase our project’s scope. We have not experienced the ‘too many cooks in the kitchen’ phenomena, major conflicting ideas, or excessive communication issues. Even thought, like most teams, we have experienced some unexpected obstacles, all in all the project has been running fairly smoothly. I am confident our team has done everything in our power to set up our event(s) for success. However, the final piece of the puzzle is the obvious concern of every group: hoping people show up.

With all that said, has anyone experienced scope creep causing negative implications on a project? Or has anyone been on an excessively large project team causing adverse outcomes?