Scope Creep: Ending the Cycle

More often than not, it’s a longtime client submitting an occasional request for an additional review, edit, or meeting. Or maybe it’s a valuable name brand, a “loss leader,” whose satisfaction is strategic for your firm. As any client-facing organization knows, the sum of several small tasks quickly becomes a significant amount of time…and costs the equivalent of a large project over the course of a year. 

Scope creep, that is, tiny, sometimes nearly-imperceptible changes in the scope of a project, can result in full-blown overservicing (depending on a firm’s billing model) or added, uncounted costs over time.

No one wants to tell a friendly client that you can’t complete work for them, and sometimes it’s even harder to raise rates. After all, your business survives based on client satisfaction! 

Developing a plan of action ahead of time to deal with both internal tendency and external pressure to allow too much scope creep will promote trust among clients AND mitigate any resentment staff may feel.

1. Reward Your Team for Not Over-Servicing

Your teams are bound to build relationships with clients; they naturally want to go above and beyond previously agreed-upon terms. Incentivizing behavior that benefits the firm while equipping them to minimize conflict with clients will go a long way. You may consider internal competitions for hitting service level targets, a profit sharing model, or even an evening event with clients at the conclusion of a successfully-managed project.

2. Clarify to Clients How Scope Creep May Be Hurting Their Businesses As Well

The best way to get ahead of external pressure from a client who desires more check-ins, conversations, and meetings than comfortably fit in the budget: seek alignment with the client on the ultimate goal. The client likely demands time because the project is important to him or her. Clarify that if your time allotted to the project is spent in communication, you will have less time for the quality of work you’d like to deliver. Use your precise time-tracking data as supporting evidence for this conversation.

3. Identify The Outliers

There’s a chance that many, if not all, of your clients are being over-serviced. However, the goal is to focus on the areas of biggest impact. Tap into your time tracking, phone records, analytics, and client management systems to understand which clients require the most hand-holding. This develops a benchmark for when you check back in and see how well your efforts have been.

4. Practice Self-Awareness in Proposals

It is, of course, easiest to avoid issues before they arise. Accurate up-front proposals require a sound understanding of your internal costs, future capacity, and potential risk factors. To nail each of these every time, great historical data as well as capacity forecasting are features to look for in resource management software. Confidence in proposals will save you awkward re-negotiations down the line.

5. Propose Trade-offs When Clients Ask for Extra Work

In the event time, service, or a deliverable previously unaccounted-for do become important to your client, it’s important to have a game plan in place. If you have an agreement, contract, or a list of services you offer for certain prices, explain to the client that the additional service or product isn’t included with their current package. Then, give them the option to make up the cost or to trade out one of the services included in the contract. For instance, they might decide that they don’t need a logo designed, but would like additional website maintenance.

6. Implement Detailed Time Tracking

Our experience in tracking billions (yes, billions) of work hours is that without detailed records, both client and vendor are in the dark. Encourage your team to be as detailed as possible in tracking their time to improve conversations down the road. This way, you’re able to look at one (let’s say IT consulting) client and see that your employees are spending an extraordinary amount of time responding to emails and comparatively little on planning an implementation or troubleshooting. The right time tracker will make this abundantly clear and allow you to move resources in the most efficient way.

Keep in Mind

Firms have plenty of good reasons to allow scope creep. The challenge is that this is very rarely in anyone’s best interest, including the client. A few proactive steps in place ahead of any issues that arise will both equip your teams to handle complicated situations and limit the issue in the first place.