Understand the root cause of scope creep & disagreements

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.