Scope creep can be introduced to a project when you’ve an imaginative development team and they think that they’re going to add some extra value into your product and then start going ahead and making stuff by themselves. Scope creep pops up with intention of adding value to teams, but in actuality, they are not.
I’ve been in industry for over 12 years and being a developer, sometimes you can get carried away with new technology, new software, new way of doing something and you want to bring that into a project.
That’s not when you should bring it in. You should do that on the next project when you can start from scratch with that model or process or whatever it may be.
Sometimes there’s certain words or phrases and as a client you should be trying to catch those. They’ll be like “wouldn’t it be cool if we did this”?
Or
“How about we try this new thing that I found”?
If you’re hearing this from your team, just bring up that you don’t want to start introducing brand new things or you’ve got a requirements list, you’ve got a process in place and the project is clear.
As a developer you shouldn’t be adding new stuff into your software because you think it’s going to add more value to the client and make a better product. It needs to go through the normal mechanisms, motions and processes so that you can develop clear software, solve the problems which are needs to solve and deliver upon them properly.
Your client or your startup needs ROI (return on investment). Your teams need to add value to your project.
They don’t need to keep paying for development because you want to throw in new features.
It’s really a team effort. As a team, you shouldn’t really just keep throwing things out there and saying all right, this would be cool if we did this and it will add more value.
The client and the team need to keep themselves in to check these sorts of things. Don’t just add things for the sake of adding them.
Follow the plan and the plan will lead you to success.
