Scope Creep: Keeping Your Projects on Time and On Budget

When you are starting your own business there are a number of things you don’t learn in business school. Sure you learn accounting and marketing, but you don’t learn that when dealing with customers and clients there is always going to be “Scope Creep”.

Scope Creep is when you tell your client what you will deliver and then as you are working on the project that client starts adding on new items that might be only slight tweaks and modifications but can really eat into you time and budget.

How do you avoid this? You put together a time line, a bulleted list of deliverables and you specify what is “In Scope” and “Out of Scope” i.e. – the finished product will:

1. Run On Batteries
2. Is Water Proof

The finished product will not:

1. Run on Solar Power
2. Will not work underwater

I won’t get into all the details on this site, but in many of my projects I didn’t start out with a good scope of the project. I’d send emails to clients with a list of deliverables, they would respond with a “Go Ahead” and then 6 months later the project would not be wrapped up because of all the changes and modifications. In the end it wasn’t my clients fault, it was mine. I needed to be the one to set boundaries. To specify the number of revisions and to set a price either per revision or hourly that was agreed upon BEFORE the project was started.

Once you have clearly outlined your project, be sure and attach it to a contract, print two copies and have both parties sign it. Keep one for yourself and give one to them. Do not believe that people will be trustworthy even if they are your friends. Unfortunately people have a way of making business personal and what is personal business and so it is best to protect yourself if you want to be paid for your work.

For more information on Scope Creep check out this article.