Joining, working on and leading a committee – 9: charter revisions and scope creep

This is my ninth installment in a series on committees, and on joining, working on and leading them (see my Guide to Effective Job Search and Career Development – 2, postings 206-213 for parts 1-8.) And in a fundamental sense I turn back in this posting to the core issues that I started with in the first series installment.

I wrote in Part 1 about committee charters, and about how effective committees have specific goals and about how they work towards them with specific priorities. I also noted that one of the principle reasons why committees fail is that even when they do start out with set goals and objectives, their purpose can drift – and they can be taken over by loss of focus and scope creep. This later issue is in fact one of the primary ways as to how a potentially effective committee fails. More and more extraneous activities and tasks and unrelated goals are taken on and before long no one there can actually tell you what, in practice, that committee is supposed to be doing anymore and certainly not from what they are working on.

But that said, there are times when a committee charter has to be changed and updated if the committee is to remain relevant and productive. Just to cite a few possibilities here, by way of example:

• If a key deadline is changed that is crucial to a committee and its charter, the charter needs to be updated to reflect this new reality. Its charter has to be course corrected so that priorities make sense and are still reachable within its new time frame.
• If an organizationally defined strategic or operational goal or need is changed that informs the committee charter then that charter may become irrelevant, and the committee in that situation should simply be disbanded. But if the overall goals of the charter are still important and of significant here-and-now priority, then the charter should be updated and corrected to reflect that. And this may or may not involve a change in the time frame and the deadline in which committee work has to be finished too.

Sometimes change is spurious and disruptive, and damaging to the capacity of a committee to actually accomplish anything of its intended purpose. Sometimes change is needed to make success even a possibility, and on time and according to real world strategic and operational need.

• How do you tell the two apart?
• Given that, how do you limit the former, and effectively revise a charter to complete goals in the face of the later?

In a way I have already at least strongly hinted at the answer of both of these questions in how I phrased the second of them.

• Scope creep is essentially always brought in as ad hoc change, and tiny increments that cumulatively add up – one small shift in focus and effort at a time. In this, scope creep is usually a committee’s version of death by a thousand tiny cuts.
• This is almost always done as if on the side and without being acknowledged for its impact, either as individual course changing actions or cumulatively on the “purpose” of the committee. Committee members still stay they are doing the same thing (only perhaps “larger”) even as they no longer really are.
• Changes that are constructive and supportive of that committee actually achieving its set goals are formally recognized and are drafted as planned out changes in a formal committee charter.
• And these changes are never simply determined ad hoc. They are strategically and operationally planned out for their impact on what the committee is to do, who needs to be on it to do that work, and how long they would have to re-plan and do it.

And I come back to the opening “bad committee” jokes of a committee being “a beast with many arms, many legs, many mouths and no brains” and this is a big part of where that operationally comes from. Ad hoc leads to everyone doing things and being busy but with no overall goals that all members coordinately work on.

Think of the badly organized and managed committees you have seen and worked on, and of the committees that you have seen fail in reaching usable goals. Chances at that they failed from falling into at least one of two traps:

• They did way too much that did not support or advance their stated original goals where they remained relevant – scope creep in its various forms, or
• They failed to update and course-correct their charter when external factors that defined their committee’s purpose changed around them – a failure to make or follow through on necessary charter revisions when that was called for.

As a final thought here, and as at least a partial antidote for both of these potential failings, never run a committee or work on one as if in a vacuum.

• Know who the stakeholders are who count on the committee successfully completing its tasks.
• Keep an eye on the context as a whole that your committee is functioning in and that it seeks to contribute to.
• Look for changes that might impact on what you do and that could call for course corrections where they would make sense.
• Use this perspective to make sure your are not doing extraneous work too, that might be of interest to you but that does not advance achieving the actual goals you should be working towards.

I am going to turn to the issues of joining an already existing committee and getting up to speed in contributing to it in my next series installment.

You can find this posting and others of this series at Guide to Effective Job Search and Career Development – 2. I have also posted extensively on jobs and careers-related topics in my first Guide directory page on Job Search and Career Development.

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