Perpetual State of Scope Creep
Question: "I think that we are in a perpetual state of scope creep with a never-ending stream of tickets. My colleagues say I am wrong. I need your help to better articulate my position."
Scope creep is an ongoing and undesired situation where uncontrolled modifications, primarily additions, are made to the product's feature set.
Scope creep occurs when the product's feature set is not fully defined or not fully documented, or not adequately controlled for versioning or prioritization.
The adverse effect of scope creep is that the product release date is constantly postponed, and there is a continuous demand for more budget and resources.
A significant risk that scope creep can pose is the need to fundamentally modify the system architecture at a certain point in time because of newly discovered and critical functionality that must be added.
Main reasons for scope creep include:
- Product development adds features without being asked to do so.
- Product management does not fully understand the market problem and routinely adds features.
- The nature of the development method is discovery-based, thus by design, the feature set constantly grows.
Dealing with scope creep is covered in the Procedural Requirements Management™ (PRM) module in the Blackblot Strategic Product Manager™ (SPMR) course.