Understand the root cause of scope creep & disagreements
by Alex Roan on Oct 3, 2024
Understand the root cause of scope creep & disagreements
- Clients may underestimate requirements
- (lack of diligence, lack of knowledge, unexpected consequences)
- Providers may misunderstand the scope of work (client’s true objective)
- Bad faith: clients may intentionally be vague or misleading.
Make sure you have the basics in place
- Don’t start work without a contract. Reference a statement of work (SoW)
- Document the scope of work in a very detailed way in the SoW
- Leverage tables, mock-ups etc. make it easy to understand for all
- Clearly state ‘in scope’, ‘out of scope’ and ‘assumptions’
- Plan for one or two ‘freebie’ changes in your estimate to keep clients happy
And some specific suggestions based on my experience
Dealing with vague or unclear clients:
- Clients may not be clear on requirements at the start. This can make it hard to scope and price work. You can suggest alternate ways to proceed:
- Suggest a discovery phase to investigate and define requirements
- Suggest the design/build of alternate solution options to explore
- Or failing that it might be worth suggestion to work on a time basis.
Pre-emptively avoiding scope changes:
At the outset invest time to get the contract and SoW right:
- Share a ‘sample’ of what requirements should look like
- ‘Audit’ the client requirements and provide feedback on what is missing
- Clearly document your expectations of what is ‘out of scope’
- Build and use a questionnaire to tease out and clarify requirements.
Clients ask for changes or additional features:
- Strictly maintain a feedback/review log. If an item falls outside of the ’SoW’ move it to a change request log. Pro-actively price and communicate changes
- Specify a fixed no. of ‘free’ hours for revisions. Assign estimate hours to change requests and allow clients to prioritize what they want
- Specify a fixed no. of review / feedback iterations. One or two should be enough if the client reviews in a diligent way
- Nominate a limited number of client people to provide feedback and request collated feedback to avoid any conflicts.