Scope creep

The Project Management Institute describes scope creep as the uncontrolled expansion of product or project scope without adjustments to time, cost and resources. The key word is uncontrolled. A change during a project is normal and often right. Scope creep is the change that is not treated as a change: no effort estimate, no new date, no sign-off.

The figures are high. In the Pulse of the Profession 2018, the institute's survey of 4,455 project practitioners worldwide, 52 per cent of projects completed in the twelve months before the survey experienced scope creep, up from 43 per cent five years earlier. Among the organisations the institute rates as high performers the share was 33 per cent, among the weakest 69 per cent. In the survey Naming the Pain in Requirements Engineering, 33 per cent of 228 companies named moving targets as a problem, 39 of them as the cause of a failed project.

The most common cause is a missing reference point. Where scope is only vaguely described, there is nothing for a new request to deviate from, so it goes unnoticed. Three simple things help: a described scope with a line stating what is not included, a fixed route for changes in which every new request is priced in effort and time before it is built, and one person who accepts changes. Scope creep hits both sides: the agency works unpaid, and the client gets the result later.