Scope creep is one of your project team’s worst enemies. And just like dandruff, telemarketers, and that horrifying 1980’s John Carpenter movie soundtrack you can’t get out of your head, scope creep always manages to somehow claw its way back into your life—like something descending from another world.
Good thing we brought help. The Louder Than Ten team has pulled together some of the most important lessons and insights from our digital project management training to help you diagnose, treat, and triage the four most common kinds of scope creep. Plus, we’ve also shared some of our favourite tips and scripts that will help you prevent your scopes from creeping while also creating stronger relationships with your stakeholders. That way you can turn scope creep into the best friend you never knew you had while avoiding the demon it can become.
What is scope creep?
Scope creep: “Changes, continuous or uncontrolled growth in a project’s scope, at any point after the project begins.”
I know it’s a bit cliché to start an article with a definition from the dictionary but it’s also a bit cliché for clients to say they want one tiny change when everyone knows they really want something bigger, better, more detailed, and more complex. It’s death by a thousand cuts.
Scope creep is an insidious, subtle process that starts with small requests and “reasonable” adjustments but grows and mutates until you’re expected (or forced) to do more work within the same time and/or for the same amount of money. It’s painfully common and happens when a project that is not properly defined, documented or controlled.
Why does scope creep happen?
Scope creep takes on multiple forms and can occur for a number of reasons—a misunderstanding about (or poor understanding of) the project, competing priorities within an agency, changing team members or market conditions. But it happens most often when expectations, goals, and outcomes become misaligned.
Scope creep can be quick and blunt (and painful) or it can be slow and subtle (and still be a tentacle to the gut). You may find yourself months into a project, looking around at your shellshocked team and an unmanageable queue of deliverables unable to even recognize the original project outline. You might get an eerie warning as you attempt to soften the idea of a new, thoroughly unnecessary feature to your developers as they cry at their desks till midnight.
We’ve all had projects get away from us—even when we thought we were on top of things. All of a sudden you feel lost like a team of researchers hunting a shape-shifting alien in Antarctica. And it’s often difficult to pinpoint exactly when and how those project boundaries get breached. That’s because scope creep is just as often a result of human error or a breakdown in communication as it is technical requirements morphing or getting shuffled and reprioritized. It’s normal and it happens. The good news is that you can also learn how to keep it from happening as often (or as drastically) so you can survive its murderous rampage.
How does scope creep affect the project and the team?
Scope creep is a fickle creature. You or your team can cause it inadvertently by trying to please your project stakeholders (or your boss) as you learn more about the project. Your stakeholders or clients can cause it by trying to please their own executives or shareholders or trying to get the most bang for their budget. Either way, it will impact your working relationships and the project itself in a diabolical number of ways.
- Goals and outcomes change
- Stakeholder relationships and alignment suffer
- Project scope, timeline, and budget stretch out
- Project slows down/pauses
- People lose faith in the project/themselves/each other
- Teams get stressed and prickly and/or people quit
- The cycle repeats and you do it all again
You can stop scope creep once you spot it. But first, you have to learn how to spot it—recognizing when and how it is happening. There are different forms of scope creep to thwart and/or avoid and each one demands a slightly different approach.
Four types of scope creep
Scope creep can impact both your ‘scope’ as a noun (i.e., the specific project goals, deliverables, features, functions, tasks, deadlines, and costs) and as a verb (i.e., the act of scoping—determining and documenting what we need to achieve and the work we have to do in order to deliver a project).
It can happen internally. It can happen externally. And it can work its inky tendrils into many different aspects of your project without you necessarily realizing—processes, effort, assumptions, and timelines. However, we can break down the most common examples of scope creep into five distinctly evil types: business creep, effort creep, hope creep, feature creep, and Radiohead’s Creep. (Just kidding, there are only four.)
Business Creep
This variety of scope creep (what we call Business Creep) happens when your organization or other project stakeholders change some aspect of their business relationship in relation to the project scope— they may change their mind, their understanding, their roles, their process, or their priorities. Business creep can also manifest when you fail to properly understand your business environment or when you make assumptions about project requirements (i.e., you try to fix the problem before you fully understand it). It’s the result of unchecked momentum—getting caught up in rounds of requests that push out your schedule as the original project plan starts to unwind.
Business creep often happens fairly early in the project process. But often you and your team may not recognize this kind of scope creep until you’re already deep into the work—especially if you work for long uninterrupted periods behind closed doors before sharing large chunks of work to your stakeholders.
If I was an imitation, a perfect imitation, how would you know if it was really me?
Examples of business creep
- Your client, a new startup, brings in an investor who wants to change the product’s major audience and outcomes to make it more profitable. If the startup obliges, the investor will give them a higher valuation. They alert your team about the new outcomes after you’ve already started design. What do you do?
- The CEO wants to weigh in on the project direction suddenly. She swoops in and poops on your team’s software plan and demands a completely new round of designs. What now?
- Your team didn’t ask the right questions about business goals during kickoff and built something that doesn’t meet the criteria you just clarified. You’ve just realized this. How should you move forward?
| Symptom | Cause | Treatment |
|---|---|---|
Poor requirements gathering | This ties back to improper research and unvetted assumptions. If the scope requirements you have are vague because you’re trying to leave room for change, expect that your stakeholders will demand to see those changes in the form of revisions when they realize you’re not sure what you’re building. | Confirm your understanding of the project goals and scope. Rescope the project with more detail, focusing on outcomes not features, and determine any additional time or budget needed. Or consider running this as a more agile project with a flexible budget and timeline. |
Stakeholder misalignment/difficult stakeholders | When stakeholders can’t agree on outcomes and goals or sabotage each other or the project, this is a toxic project environment. Scope creep and massive delays will often result. | Put the project on pause until you can align stakeholders. If you can’t, end the project and limit your losses. If you have a good relationship, use this as an opportunity to offer consulting/education to build strategic alignment. |
Business scope is tricky to monitor and measure, but the best project leads know that managing business scope like a relationship (with respect, humility, and firm boundaries) can turn scary situations into more balanced, realistic project outcomes and restful slumber.
Effort Creep
Effort creep is often caused by a shortage of skills or knowledge, unchecked optimism about the work involved, or priorities shifting on the team side. Humans are terrible at scoping and often miscalculate the amount of effort involved (especially when scoping complex tasks or new technologies in development). When this happens, you’ll need to call for extra help and have tough conversations with your team and other decision-makers. You will have to admit that you didn’t estimate effort accurately and that you need more time or budget to complete the project. Your organization may have to eat some time for learning new technologies or onboarding new help.
Effort creep often looks like (and feels like) wheels spinning in the mud. It creates a situation where no matter how much effort your team puts in, you constantly fall behind and can’t seem to make any meaningful progress; you can’t seem to get any closer to the finish line. Effort creep often happens within a project team, but external stakeholders create it, too—like all those times your client holds up the project because of content they’re struggling to write or product images they’ve been promising for months.
I don’t know what the hell’s in there, but it’s weird and pissed off, whatever it is.
Examples of effort creep
- Your developer underestimated the difficulty of integrating the project with your client’s Customer Relationship Manager. Progress keeps getting hampered by the CRM’s buggy API which causes your developer to spend extra time troubleshooting and bug fixing. What now?
- Your team insisted on using a new Javascript framework for your project believing it would save development time. It turns out the framework is more complex than initially anticipated and the team is spending additional time learning the framework. What do you do?
- The designer cannot get anywhere with the new logo design. They aren’t producing designs that they, themselves, like and project decision-makers keep rejecting the ideas. How do you move forward?
| Symptom | Cause | Treatment |
|---|---|---|
Team got busy with other tasks and now has to switch focus | Your team was working frantically to meet another deadline or got distracted and started focusing on the wrong priorities. Now you’re stuck in a situation where one project or task bumps out another and you’re running out of time and/or budget. This usually happens when people are over capacity and priorities are unclear or shifting constantly. | Have a meeting with your team to realign priorities and thank them for their hard work. Make sure to get their input about ways to reduce the scope of the project. In the future, work at anticipating the barriers you’ll face and build in appropriate breaks and buffers. Clients often suffer from this problem too, so tack on extra time for reviews and approvals as well as client content production and testing. |
Lack of skills or knowledge to complete the work | Often when you’re building a new product, the technology you use is often outdated well before it launches. This usually means you have to learn new technologies or add-ons or approaches every time you start another project. Think about how teams estimate or scope for work they’ve never done before. Accept that you’ll need to keep learning regardless of how long you’ve been doing this (and embrace that learning). | Consider taking a more agile or flexible approach to the scope so you can spend time learning. Build in more research time to learn the tool or technology (maybe treat some of that budget as professional development rather than billing directly to the client if you’re not confident in outcomes). Say no to projects that take you further away from your developmental goals or don’t align with your team’s expertise. |
Effort creep is often hard work put into the wrong places at the wrong times. It’s a product of misplaced optimism, poor resourcing, weak collaboration, and runaway panic. Interestingly, effort creep can often lead to hope creep: a desire to hide the truth about project progress (and sometimes your alien identity).
Hope Creep
This is the type of scope creep manifests when you and/or your team continue to believe that you can meet your deadlines, requirements, or outcomes when deep down you know you can’t. Think of those times when you’ve lied to yourself, your team, or your clients (or other decision makers) in order to keep everyone happy and keep things moving even though the train has already started to come off the tracks.
This type of scope creep is the result of well-intentioned (but dangerous) optimism and/or a lack of trust between stakeholders. Nobody wants to let anyone down, so everyone lets everyone down. It’s a sneaky form of scope creep and very hard to spot. You don’t often see it until it’s already happened. If your team is telling you they’re doing great why would you doubt them? They look like they’re telling the truth.
I just cannot believe any of this voodoo bullshit.
Examples of hope creep
- The front-end developer has one week left to complete the interface code before launch. They insist that it’ll be ready even though they still have three other features they haven’t even started yet. How do you react?
- The designer says the final prototype will be ready for the deadline tomorrow but they’ve handed it directly off to the client for a first review with two hours ago. What now?
- Talking to your client lead, your business developer insists that your team can create Android apps even though your organization has never created one before and it’s turning out to be more difficult than you expected. How should you handle it?
| Symptom | Cause | Treatment |
|---|---|---|
Project leads don’t have a good system for communicating needs or progress | Oops, maybe it’s been a few weeks since you touched base with your client—maybe you were waiting for your team to give you a progress report. Now you find out your team is behind and your client is angry. Hope creep just cropped up. | This problem needs a process. Consistent and regular communication that highlights both the progress and barriers gives stakeholders a realistic idea of how projects flow (there will always be bumps, best to let them know). |
Stakeholders are scared of screwing up or disappointing others | Aka your team or other decision makers have Imposter Syndrome and are afraid to be honest about what they’re up to in case it falls short of expectations. This happens when people on the team put a lot of pressure on themselves to be perfect. It also happens when middle managers are scared that they might lose their power or get trampled by others higher up the ladder. Hope creep naturally oozes out of people’s need for approval and acceptance. | Talk openly with teams and external stakeholders about mistakes, failures, and working together for continuous improvement. Focus less on nailing it the first time, and more on listening and sharing collaboratively to prioritize the right things. The first draft shouldn’t be perfect, but your team and clients need you to help them see and genuinely believe that. Your organization’s culture will (or can) help to reinforce this belief. |
Hope creep ruins stakeholder relationships and usually ends up with project-wide disappointment. The solution? Quit lying to yourself. Ask your team to be honest with you. If the truth is going to be hard to hear, it’s better to hear it sooner rather than later. Build trust with your clients and your team and encourage an open environment where mistakes or setbacks are okay because your team is able to approach them as learning opportunities. Plus, it rallies the team around impending disaster (you know, in case aliens attack).
Feature Creep
Feature creep is often driven by perfectionism or an overwhelming need to please others. It can also happen if requirements are unclear or incomplete and the project team fills those gaps with assumptions rather than taking the time to find out the right answer. (“I don’t know what to do, so I’ll just do what I know.”)
Feature creep sometimes goes by the nickname gold plating because it often results in unnecessary features or embellishments to features that weren’t asked for or needed (but cost a lot in terms of time or resources). Luckily, this is is one of the easiest kinds of scope to manage. You just need to know how to spot it and stop it in its tracks.
That thing wanted to be US! A cell gets out, and it’ll imitate everything on the face of the Earth! AND NOTHING CAN STOP IT!
Examples of feature creep
- The designer insists on hand-illustrating all site visuals instead of using stock media on a set of cheap event brochures for your client’s 10% Tuesday sale because it looks better. Now what?
- The developers have been using Ruby on Rails and React to build the client’s very basic website and blog because that’s their code stack. What do you do?
- The client asks to add “liking” capability to user posts in their 80’s movie quotes app halfway through the project. How do you react?
| Symptom | Cause | Treatment |
|---|---|---|
Requirements are unclear and team fills in the gaps the best they can | If you don’t know exactly what you’re building (and how), it’s tempting to fill in the blanks with guesses based on assumptions about what your stakeholders need and want. Nobody stops to ask what should be done or how things should be built. If you don’t clarify those gaps, it paves the way for even more scope creep and will eventually bleed you dry. | Are you 100% confident that what you’re building achieves your stakeholders’ goals? If not, then you should probably double check. Sit down with your team and go over your understanding of the scope and budget. Clarify with your stakeholders that you’re still on the right path. If you can, simplify your scope and minimize complexity whenever you possible. You can always add fancy whistles later. First you have to make sure the thing you’re building is the thing they really need. |
You really want to impress that new client (or the entire world) | Organizations commonly make the mistake of bending at angles to accommodate new clients as a way to impress them and make them stick around. While creating a specialized experience, this does not bode well for sustainable long-term work. In fact, it often leads to your organization bleeding out on scope. | If you really want to impress your client, understand their business goals and create something valuable for their audience. That’s how you get respect. But if you’re super nice and want to show you care, agree with your team on one nice thing you will do for them—something that doesn’t harm the scope and something that you can likely bill in future phases later. |
Feature creep is usually internal and not actually caused by external stakeholders. Yes, your stakeholders or clients might have requested a bunch of zingy new features, but you as the project lead you have the power to say no, delay the feature, or charge more to prioritize it. Once again, the best defence is simply open, honest, and frequent communication among your project team. And sometimes a flame thrower.
Tips to avoid scope creep
It can be downright stressful to have to manage and mitigate scope day after day. (And trust us, you will probably be doing it every day.) So here are some of our favourite tips for establishing expectations, reducing stress, and catching your teammates before they are trapped by a scope creep monster the likes they have never seen.
Share ideas
Be more collaborative. I know we keep hammering this home like a terrified man shooting a gun in the dark, but working alongside all decision-makers to agree on common goals is probably one of the most powerful ways to avoid scope creep. Share progress early and often, get feedback based on outcomes and next steps, not feature sets. Talk about priorities every day. Use supportive language that denotes teams and working together. Use “we” more than “I” or “they.” And make sure that thing you make knows you’re the boss.
Pay attention
Do a gut check from time to time. Ask yourself: Has something changed, stalled, or gone eerily quiet? When something is about to go wrong, there is often an eerie quiet or subtle, odd behaviours. Watch for stakeholders bottling up or seeming terse or vague. Note when teams are getting cranky or hard to reach. Pay attention to unexpected delays in communication. These are signs that the sands might be shifting under your feet. Reach out and reaffirm the goals of the project, the tools and support available, and be there to listen. Situational awareness is a survival tool.
Re-baseline your project
Once you’ve revisited any changes to your scope, make sure you carve out time to review your budget and schedule so you can update your project baseline. This will prevent you from bleeding over and doing free work that keeps your team up late. Get your stakeholders to sign off on that updated budget and timeline, too, so you can prove you overcame the worst.
Practice your scripts
Scripts can be truly life-saving. They are a form of artful communication that sets boundaries and expectations while building trust among the entire project team. It may seem odd at first to be reading lines on calls with clients, but every time you practice them, they’ll feel a little more natural. The key here is recognizing the words, phrases and body language your stakeholders use when they’re asking for change. When you hear (or see) those cues, it’s time for your response. Here are some handy scripts you can use as your best defence.
For Saying No: “It sounds like this is really important to your stakeholders/audience. Right now we don’t have the time to build that feature in if we want to launch on time. Let’s move ahead with what we’ve got and chat if those priorities become more important than our current direction.”
For Giving Options: “How important does item x feel compared to y or z? Since we want to focus on the top priorities for your audience, which will best support those goals?”
For Getting Clarification: “Let’s take some time to sit down and make sure nothing has shifted since our last chat. It’s really important that our team is completely aligned together. For instance, when you say x, do you mean this or do you mean that? Thanks for clarifying.”
And, if all else fails, put some fire on it.
Get some hands-on help
It can be very stressful to have to manage scope creep on top of everything (and everyone) else you have to keep tabs on, especially when scope creep is on a tear. It’s a lot to ask of one person. And that’s one of the reasons we created Louder Than Ten Training courses. They’re custom-built to help project leads (and their teams) understand and tackle the trickiest parts of project management—scope creep, stakeholder onboarding, sales and project intake, estimating, team-building—while working on their actual projects with their actual teams.
And the best part is that all of our apprentices are supported by the entire Louder Than Ten team and a cohort of other project teams that are going through the same things and addressing the same problems. It’s a community of smart, driven, and passionate people learning how to empower their agencies to work better and save money. If you want to put some breaks on these nasty scope creeps, reach out. We’ll show you how our training programs can fix your projects, protect your people, and transform your organization.
