| Open Workbench for Tracking Scope Creep
By James McLellan
Summary
A common problem in engineering environments is tracking "small things" that either don’t make it onto the master schedule or were planned off the schedule somewhere else and not communicated to the rest of the staff, so they end up being done regardless.
Open Workbench can be used to let your worker’s keep their own atomic level "to-do" lists and let’s the changes propagate automatically into the large roll-up schedules so that the impacts of scope creep are identified immediately by the folks who make the decisions.
How To Do It (that is, How To Track Scope Creep with Open Workbench)
Figure 1: You Can’t Have Documentation without a Block Diagram
- Each individual has their own OpenWorkbench project which includes their assigned tasks. An example:
Example: Bobby’s Schedule
WBS Number |
Task |
| 1.0.1 |
Make Widget |
| 1.1.1 |
Write TPS Reports |
- Each programmer is encouraged to add sub-tasks as they realize low-level derived requirements, update their hours expended, % complete, ETC, material requirements, etc.
Example: Bobby’s Schedule
WBS Number |
Task |
| 1.0.1 |
Make Widget |
| |
Make "W" |
| |
Make "I" |
| 1.1.1 |
Write TPS Reports |
Figure 2: Example of Individual Schedule in OpenWorkbench
- There is a button that will load the hours and spread them out according to dependency and priority information. This allows changes to the schedule to be calculated automatically.
- All of the engineer's
individual To-Do lists can be linked together to get a picture of the whole project. How to do that is below. Someone looking from the top-level can merely review the roll-ups to track earned value.
How-To: Connect OpenWorkbench Projects
- Open a new OpenWorkbench project
- Right-click on the "ID" or "Name" field. Select "insert sub-project". Insert the subproject you’re interested in. In this example, I uploaded "sample-jmass-guy".
- Items in red are milestones. Items in blue-green are completed. Items in purple are started. Items in black are scheduled, but not started.
- Right-click again on a blank space to add another person’s schedule.
- Now, if Bobby makes a change to the smallest part of his to-do list, the trickle-down effect gets captured automatically.
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