You know that saying, “the silent killer”, well that’s pretty much what this is. I have implemented many solutions throughout my professional career. Now if I were to tell you what 90% of all those projects had in common, I would say scope creep.

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You’re a new hire at a technology firm, you’re fresh out of school, graduated ready to take on the world and develop the latest and greatest solutions for your clients. You know the latest and greatest languages, specs, and practices, what else do you need to know? Well, it’s like what they say, you don’t what you don’t know.

Assuming you follow AGILE principles, you would not deliver a project at the end of the road map. Typical practice is to perform a small unit of work and then deliver that to the client and allow them to manipulate it and provide you with feedback. This is great and all, but beware of the one thing that any new person might not be aware of, scope creep.

You see when your end-users start to interact with the product that you deploy every few times per month something tends to happen. Your clients start to see what the product actually looks like. This is a good thing, you are getting real-world feedback from people who are actually going to use this. That being said real-world feedback comes with real-world changes. This is where working on a project becomes tricky. When you work for a firm that is in charge of delivering a project, you typically have a set amount of hours dedicated to the said project. So, what happens when your project manager starts to say yes to all of the changes requested without affecting the project deliverables or hours dedicated to the project? Let me give you the short answer, scope creep.

Scope creep, is probably one of the things that easily starts the path for project failure. Tensions start to arise as developers don’t have enough time to deliver on what is expected, project managers don’t have enough budget to deliver on the client’s expectations, and clients don’t get what they were promised. Proper planning and evaluation of next week’s work can help prevent these issues. Leveraging the concept of assigning a weight to work (see Fibonacci series blog) can help prevent scope creep. See I would love to tell you, just follow steps 1 through 8 and you will never have to deal with scope creep again. The thing is I would be lying to you, scope creep has multiple ways of making its way into a project.

Luckily, the developers at Scope-R have built a tool to help your organization prevent scope creep from entering your projects. Leveraging some of the concepts listed above you can prevent frustrations on your project by seeing it coming and being proactive instead of being reactive.