Scope Creep

Many times at a work, I have been involved in projects that experience what we call "Scope Creep". The original project objective seems to expand as time goes on...the thought process goes something like this - As long as we are developing this new functionality, we might as well do some extra work because the reward is much greater than the effort.

At home, we often experience this same phenomena. Take yesterday for example. We started out with a simple objective – clean the garage. The goal was to spend about two hours performing this dreaded chore. Fearing the heat of the day, we (all five of us) got up relatively early, had breakfast (Uncle Ron’s Pancakes, Marilee’s healthy version) and started our project. My personal scope creep happened almost as soon as we started. I came across a mostly used container of Round-up. Hmm, might as well use this up. So I left the garage and canvassed the yard and located areas where I wanted to eradicate anything that grows on that spot. I successfully used up the rest of the container. I triumphantly tossed the spent container into the mostly empty garbage bag. My sense of accomplishment was short lived, however. As I surveyed the rest of the garage, I realized there was a ton of work left to do.
As I was cleaning off the work bench, I glanced over at the two shelves in the corner of the garage. I noticed how droopy they were. I thought of our resident master craftsman, Uncle Ron. These shelves would have no place in his garage. As long as we are cleaning the garage, I might as well replace the shelves. After I took the two shelves down, I noticed scuff marks and holes in the wall. Hmm, might was well paint the wall, especially since we have paint that has been sitting around for several years. You can’t paint without first putting spackle in all holes. After applying a little spackle and a lot of paint, the wall looked really good. A little too good. The adjacent wall looked terrible, especially the door and molding. Hmm, might as well paint the door while we are at it. While Kristin worked on the second wall, I went to the store to buy the supplies I needed to build the shelves. Kristin’s initial intent was to paint the door and molding. She couldn’t ignore the surrounding wall, so she painted the wall as well. Then she decided to paint the cabinet doors. The doors looked great when she finished, but the cabinet frames looked dingy. So she painted the frames.
Meanwhile, I proceeded to build the shelves. Of course, once the shelves were built and installed on the wall, they stuck out like a sore thumb. Luckily, we had enough paint left over to apply two coats to the shelves. At the end of the day, we had two new shelves, two painted walls (and cupboards) and a dirty garage. Looks like we will have Family Project, Part II coming up soon. Who knows, maybe by the time we are done, the entire garage will receive a fresh coat of paint. Hmm, I wonder what my 10 year old Camry will look like in a clean garage…