Scope Creep: How to Slay the All-Consuming Dragon (Part 1)
“Just a few more quick changes.”
This is the sentence every creative dreads.?
It is a sentence that immolates profit margins faster than The Joker pouring kerosene on a mountain of cash and cackling maniacally as the black smoke belches towards heaven.
Those precious dollars could have been spent on family vacations, or health insurance, or loot boxes in Battlefront 2.
But no.
They will go up in smoke, pointlessly consumed by “a few more changes”
And you will either smile and eat the cost, and then break the bad news to your kids later, that Timmy must go back to work in the coal mines, and Sarah must go up for adoption.
Or you will put your foot down, demand more time and money, and risk spoiling an important client relationship.
Every creative has faced this decision with rocks in their stomach, and it barely matters which path you choose because all paths are damage control. The mistake was probably made weeks or months ago when you failed to collect the right information, or failed to set expectations properly, or both, and now you’re suffering the consequences. If you’re lucky.
If you’re unlucky, everyone around you is also suffering the consequences, and hates you for it.
Because scope creep makes everyone unhappy. The client is unhappy because you’ve blown the deadline, you’re unhappy because you’ve blown the budget, and your parents are unhappy because they gave birth to a failure and a nincompoop who has brought dishonor upon the family name.?
Amidst all this darkness, I bring joyful tidings. A voice calling out in the creative wilderness.
“Fear not, fellow nincompoops! Scope creep can be defeated. But this requires that we swallow some harsh truths.”
Scope creep always seems benign at first. A playful baby dragon that says “Aw shucks, I just noticed a couple of things …”
But the dragon grows fast, and is soon 30 feet tall, rampaging through the village, burning shrubbery, kicking hobbits, and bellowing fresh demands with each fiery breath.
In these dark moments, it seems obvious that you will never let a project run this far astray ever again, but this is a vague promise, not rooted in honest self-reflection. In all likelihood, you have no idea where you actually went wrong and therefore no way to fix it next time. It’s very tempting to retreat into easy explanations like blaming the client, or promising yourself to be more careful setting expectations.
This brings us to step one.
Don’t Lie to Yourself
The first step to defeating scope creep, is to stop buying your own bullshit, and start paying attention. Here are four difficult but necessary truths to accept about scope creep:
So what’s the solution? For starters, you must use active listening as an offensive weapon, fully commit to your first draft, and show your client how to communicate. I’ll break each of these down in more detail.
Don’t trust your notes.
Taking good notes is necessary, but it’s not enough. Think of good notes as your basic defensive strategy throughout the discovery process. You are setting yourself up for success, and covering your ass.
If you don’t have a discovery process. Here’s A Good Article about how to organize your project and gather requirements.
But as I mentioned, plenty of well-organized projects are consumed with fire and gnashing teeth every day. Organization, clear expectations and accurate requirement gathering are like your trusty steed - they will get you to the top of the mountain to find the lair, but they will not necessarily help you slay the dragon. The best way to slay a dragon is not to ride in on a snorting and stamping horse, but to sneak up and murder it in its sleep like a straight goon.?
So what weapons does a sneaky goon possess that a bold knight may lack?
Paranoia, for starters. The goon is smart enough to always be looking over their shoulder.
One of the most dangerous pitfalls of gaining a little bit of client-facing experience, is that you get arrogant and start believing you can read minds.
This can be attributed to things like Confirmation Bias and the Representativeness Heuristic.?
You may receive information that is vague or incomplete, but your brain will assure you that you understand what the client is talking about, because you’ve successfully helped clients like this before! Your past experiences with clients will start to cluster into patterns, and your brain will create a gravity field that starts warping all future inputs towards the same conclusions.
To make this even more complicated, a lot of clients suck at communicating project requirements in the first place. It’s not their fault, they just don’t understand your world.
So, bottom line - you can take perfect notes on every conversation and still be wrong, because the client is an unreliable narrator, and you are an unreliable listener. You can’t read their mind, and you can’t trust what you think you are hearing. And yet, it is vitally important that you understand what your client is requesting, and why they are requesting it.?
Okay, so we’re paranoid now, but what weapons can we deploy to strike the beast dead??
It’s okay to be wrong and be corrected, in fact that’s a plus.
The next weapon in the arsenal is active listening.
You’ve probably heard about active listening, popularized in Chris Voss’ essential negotiation book Never Split the Difference. It’s usually brought up in the context of therapy sessions or salary negotiations. There are a few key points from this book, however, that rarely make it into the reels and carousels of those repeating the same philosophy. Active Listening is more than just listening carefully, empathizing and validating the other person. It’s about using a reliable set of tools to figure out what somebody wants. In fact, 90% of the book is about figuring out what people want. I have used this book to improve client conversations a lot more often than I have used it for negotiation.
Your two basic objectives in every client conversation should be to understand their desired big-picture outcomes, and clarify any specifics they give you. These may sound like versions of the same thing, but they are not. You should put big goals and little details in two different categories because the human brain tends to put them in two different categories, and your client hopefully has a human brain. Here are three extremely common scenarios you will discover, once you have been through this exercise with your client:
Undisclosed goals and motives can wreck an entire project and render all of your perfectly executed work pointless. And unfortunately, these tend to stay hidden or slip through the cracks during the process of straightforward information-gathering. Putting your client through a more exhaustive intake process might help, but it also tends to wear your client down and make them rush through the answers, or stall the early project phases because you’ve assigned too much work.
This brings us to the next weapon - for the killing blow.
I’ve found that the solution to gathering accurate requirements fast is not the quantity of questions, but essentially triangulation. Which can be accomplished by paraphrasing.
By paraphrasing and repeating back what you think the client is saying, but in your own words, you are massively reducing the probability of communication errors because you are cross-referencing two data sets to see what matches.
The more times you do this, the more accurate and actionable your data.
Here is an excellent Resource on how to Paraphrase better and here is some interesting supporting material on Data Reduction.
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For an easy example, if your client tells you that they would like a cyan background to be “bluer” you take note of this, and then when you summarize and paraphrase, you’re going to say something like.?
“On page 5, you want the background to be bluer, so it sounds like you would like to reduce the amount of green and make it closer to sky-blue?”
You shouldn’t overthink this process - insert your own assumptions based on what you heard, because the goal here is not to sound smart, and definitely not to slow things down. The goal is to make sure that you accurately and completely understand what they want.
It’s okay to be wrong and be corrected, in fact that’s a plus. There’s a really good chance you are going to be wrong at the early communication stage, and you should speed up the feedback cycle by presenting the client with your best interpretation of what they are saying.
Do your best work at every stage.?
It's okay to look ignorant as you gather information. It is not okay to look unskilled or lazy as you begin to ship work. If you are phoning in your first draft and and then standing by for the client to tell you what you did wrong - you are fucking up.
“Do your best” sounds trite, but from experience I know that it’s surprisingly easy to lose sight of quality standards as you go through any iterative drafting process for visual or interactive media. This is because you probably have one or multiple drafting stages where you deliver incomplete work that is not intended to look complete, but rather to generate early feedback. This could be thumbnails, wireframes, sketches, storyboards, or a rough cut, depending on your medium.?
It’s easy to get cynical as you approach a first draft because you assume it’s going to get changed a million times. This will tend to translate to low effort on your part. After all ... Who cares what the first draft looks like? You're just trying to get the ideas flowing!
If you can’t believe in your own product, you’re delusional if you think the customer will.
The problem is that this acceptance of lower standards along one metric (like visuals) can easily spill over in our brains to cause lower standards in other areas (like creativity, or research) where you really need to be swinging for the fences.?
It’s important to remember that a rough draft is not just an incomplete thing - It’s a step in your process with its own measurable metrics for success. You should establish, both for yourself and the client, a clear expectation for what a good draft is, and what a bad draft is. This difference might not be aesthetic; it could relate to ideation, organization, timing, quantity, or any number of things.
For instance if you are a designer delivering early wireframes of a webpage, maybe the typefaces, colors and exact dimensions are not important, but the clarity and organization of your layout are extremely important. Or if you are an illustrator delivering rough sketches, maybe the details and coloring are of little concern, but it’s important that you use clear lines, expressive figures, and have a strong understanding of the subject’s mechanics and movement.
We’ve all probably had clients who didn’t understand the purpose of a rough draft, even after we explained it. That’s okay. YOU understand the purpose, and your rough draft needs to be good according to your standards. At the highest level, a successful rough draft is a draft that is good enough to advance to the next stage.
When you submit draft work that is sub-par, you may not receive any direct criticism, but you will almost certainly pay the price in scope creep, now and later. You are not only caving in to the idea that additional revisions are INEVITABLE at the current stage, you are also quietly eroding your client’s trust in your competence, which will tend to add cycles, because they now feel the need to get second opinions on everything you’re putting in front of them.
If you can’t believe in your own product, you’re delusional if you think the customer will. So start treating every draft like it’s the only draft, and aim to make it successful. Not perfect, but successful.
This attitude is infectious, and the expectation of success will dramatically increase your odds of finding it.
More of my thoughts on quick and successful drafting in This Article.
Educate your client on exactly how you want them to respond.
You should communicate to your client what kind of information you need during feedback, in how much detail and in what format.
There are a million ways to do this, but here are two tips that will save time and effort, no matter what kind of communication you need.
First, provide specific examples of the type of feedback you expect. This could be a bullet-point list of things for them to consider and respond to, or you could give them example placeholder sentences in your own words. You could even take it a step further and show sample feedback from a different client on a different project that you thought was good. There are no strict rules, but you would be shocked how much easier you are making it on the client and yourself by providing a clear framework and clear examples of what you want to see from them.
Second, narrow the communication funnel. If possible try to limit client contact to a single stakeholder using a single channel of communication. Getting all of your information from one person can massively streamline your workflow, and also force your direct point of contact to think through their feedback and synthesize it a bit. This is something you can ask for very directly and be honest about your reasoning, you're unlikely to offend anyone and the upside is massive.
Not everyone will agree, though. Some clients will have difficulty with this because they are internally consensus-driven, and sometimes it simply won’t be possible, especially if the project topic is complicated and requires multiple experts to weigh in. In these circumstances, just remember that two stakeholders are better than three stakeholders, and you should do whatever you can to cull extra people out of the meetings as often as possible.
On massive projects where you simply can’t avoid having five or ten different opinions on everything, your best strategy is to request a point person as the primary stakeholder, and ask them to help lead their team and clarify all feedback. If you are spammed with too much conflicting feedback as the project moves forward, lean on your point person and begin asking for help clarifying at each stage, until they either A) start helping to clarify in advance, without you asking or B) assign a different point person who can help you.
This sounds mean, but in person it's quite easy to make this a pleasant and uplifting exchange because you are asking for a favor and offering your faith and confidence. This generally feels good on the receiving end, even if it means a bit of extra work.
In Summary (Part 1)
Don’t lie to yourself about "next time". It's likely that you won’t remember, and you won’t fix anything unless you self-examine and leverage a bit of paranoia to assume that scope creep is always lurking around the corner.
Don’t trust your notes. The client is an unreliable narrator and you are an unreliable listener. Instead, deploy active listening and paraphrasing to cross-reference your information, in order to uncover the clients big-picture goals and precisely define their detailed requests, ensuring that the two are aligned before you start working.
Do your best work at every stage by clarifying what a good draft looks like before you start working, in order to maintain project velocity and your client’s trust.?
Educate your client about exactly what kind of information you need during feedback, in how much detail and in what format.
Coming Soon (Part 2)
How to escalate and wage total war against scope creep by:
Emphasizing your Constraints
Cutting out Steps, and
Focusing on Statistical Improvement.
Additional Resources
Map of Biases for a fun visual graphic of all the ways your brain hates you!
My Article on Rapid Storybuilding
My Article on Taking Leadership on Projects