Signs of Scope Creep and How to Prevent It
Scope creep refers to unanticipated changes to a project once it has started. This usually comes about due to an absence of clarity on what is being built or through insufficient up-front planning.
Typically, this is a problem that project managers wrestle with. But business owners need to mind scope creep as well -- in the interest of keeping the project within budget and on schedule.
Scope creep forces a software development team to make adjustments mid-way through their work. As a result, team members suffer through frustration, stress, and misunderstandings.
Uncontrolled changes can force a project to go beyond its projected budget and timeline. (Plain speak: more time and money.)
To prevent scope creep from becoming an inevitable part of your project, you need to keep it at bay by adopting specific strategies and practices. In this blog post, you will learn ways that will help you keep your projects on time and your team in good mental health.
What is Scope Creep?
Scope creep happens when more and more unplanned and unscheduled changes are added to a project. It can take place at any stage of the software development lifecycle.
Imagine that you're working on a website redesign with a fixed budget and schedule. During the discovery phase, you determine that the project has three core objectives:
- Improving the overall user experience
- Increasing conversion rates
- Clarifying the company's product offering.
After the team members are selected and the scope document is created, the project sets out.
In the middle of the project, a team member suggests adding the following: social media buttons, page counters, SEO plugins, and infinite scrolling.
These changes are opportunities for improvement. But uncontrolled and unscheduled, they can be considered examples of scope creep.
What's the difference between scope creep and gold plating?
The main difference is where the change request comes from. If the change comes from the product owner, then it's scope creep. If the change comes from the development team, then it's gold plating.
Gold plating can happen when there's an intention to deflect attention from an otherwise under-performing product. It can also happen when the marketing team requests features that they find appealing but don't offer value to end-users.
Gold plating can also be a result of developers trying new technologies or implementing features that they've seen in other projects.
A company's reward system may also contribute to gold plating. Some companies reward developers for the features they ship rather than the value they create (which is understandable since value is harder to measure).
In itself, gold plating is not bad. For example, spending time to make code more readable to other software developers can be considered gold plating. But it adds value: it can save other developers time figuring out what a piece of code does.
Gold plating becomes less-than-ideal if it delays a project or if it doesn't add any value.
Why Does Scope Creep Happen?
When scope creep enters a project, it is barely noticeable (hence the term). Understanding the reasons why it happen can help you read the writings on the wall early on.
The following are some of the reasons why scope creep happens:
Requirements are informally agreed upon instead of being thoroughly described in written documentation.
The requirements document lack clarity and depth. A project requirement template is a quick way to help you write requirements better.
Features are poorly prioritized so the development team rushes in to complete everything in one iteration.
How to Identify Scope Creep early on
The approach to a software project is rarely set in stone. The need to respond to changes rapidly is what gave birth to methodologies like Agile, Scrum, and DevOps.
However, sometimes changes can do more harm than good. That's why it's important to spot scope creep early on.
There are a number of questions that can help you identify and say "no" to scope creep early on.
- Is this change part of the original agreed-upon plan?
- Does the change affect the project schedule?
- Does it increase the number of project deliverables?
- Is the change needed to meet the success criteria that were set at the beginning of the project?
Different stakeholders - project managers, users, the development team, and the project stakeholder - will prioritize different features.
Learning when to say "no" or implement a change at a later time can keep budgets and timelines in control.
Strategies to Keep Scope Creep under Control
If you've already noticed signs of scope creep, you don't have to let it derail your project. Instead, you can take the following steps to keep schedule and budget under control.
Review your scope document
If you're using a project scope document, this will be easy. Review all of the parts of the document and make sure that nothing has changed. If something has changed, make a note of it so that you can respond immediately.
A typical response to this situation is to reschedule a change request to a later date or re-prioritize tickets.
Review change requests
Some questions that will guide you on whether to endorse or propose a change request:
Does the change fall within your buffer for scope and timeline?
Does it force you to increase funding or delay project delivery?
Do you need to implement the change now or can be moved to the next iteration?
Evaluate how the change affects the project timeline
Do the changes require more development time? Does it require you to put other features on hold? If you need to reshuffle your development tasks, you can refer to a project prioritization framework.
Track project progress
A project timeline template from Smartsheet, available on Google Sheets.
Project managers love project boards like Trello and Jira because they do wonders. Among their many benefits is the ability to see what's happening on your project on weekly, bi-weekly, and monthly scales. You can also customize the time scope of each report.
Project boards let you see how frequently tickets are added in the middle of a development period. When tickets are constantly added in the middle of development work, it presents a good opportunity to re-examine how change requests are handled.
Update change log
Once a change request is approved and implemented, it's time to update the change log.
A change log contains the details of the changes requested during a period (in an Agile setting, this period is typically two weeks long).
An example of a change log from ProjectManager.com.
Conclusion
Scope creep is a very real problem that all project stakeholders have to deal with at some point.
The best way to combat it is to have controls and tools in place. Some of the most useful tools you can have are:
- Prioritization frameworks
- A project management board
- A change log
Keep in mind that it's not always possible to completely prevent scope creep from happening. What you can do is be prepared to spot potential changes and have ways of dealing with them quickly so that they don't affect your project as a whole.
