Keeping Clients Within Project Boundaries

I suspect most of you have experienced “scope creep” before. Scope creep begins at the moment when your client asks for something outside of the scope of work for which you’ve contracted (you do have a contract, right?). Naturally, they’re asking for this thing to be included at no extra cost. Actually, they’re probably not asking. They’re probably acting like it’s always been understood that this thing will be included. Duh.

Scope creep is the bane of custom work. Defining the boundaries of a project can be extremely challenging and becomes more difficult the larger the project is. Many clients have difficulty understanding why estimating a creative endeavor can be difficult but for their success and for our sanity we, the vendors, need to understand the side effects of scope creep, its causes, and some possible remedies.

Scope creep has at least the following four nasty side effects, probably more:

1. It causes fixed-fee proposals to be priced higher than necessary to account for the risk scope creep will happen.


2. It causes clients to feel like their vendor isn’t very customer service oriented because the vendor seemingly responds to every additional request with a fee (for those vendors who resist scope creep).


3. It erodes project profit margins to zero and beyond (for those vendors who don’t resist scope creep).


4. It eventually forces vendors to create all sorts of protections against it in the form of wordy contracts, protective clauses, rigid processes, and whatever else can be put in place to make sure the client doesn’t have their cake and eat it too.

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