The request came in an email with the subject line “tiny addition.” It was tiny. So was the one before it, and the four before that. None of them went near the change register, because raising a change request for something tiny felt bureaucratic, and nobody wants to be the person quoting process at a client who’s being reasonable.
Six tiny additions later the team was working weekends, and the client was confused about why delivery felt strained. From where they sat, they’d asked for almost nothing.
Creep is the wrong word
Creep suggests something happening to you while you’re not looking. That’s not what I’ve seen on any project I’ve run or rescued. Scope arrives in plain sight, politely, with a business justification attached. The failure isn’t detection. It’s that the work gets accepted while the price stays frozen.
Every addition costs something. Time, money, quality, or the team’s reserves. If none of those moved when the scope did, the cost didn’t disappear. It just hasn’t been invoiced yet, and the invoice usually arrives in the last three weeks of the project. I wrote about that mechanism in the schedule or the budget.
Say yes with a price tag
The answer isn’t a change control regime with triplicate forms. Heavy process is how scope discipline dies, because people route around it. The answer is a habit: every yes comes with its cost attached, out loud, at the moment of the yes.
“Happy to add that. It’s about four days, so the options are: it displaces the reporting module, we move the date a week, or it goes in phase two. Which would you like?”
That sentence does more for a project than any register. It keeps the sponsor in the driver’s seat, it keeps the trade-off visible, and it turns scope from a slow leak into a series of priced decisions. Most sponsors, given the real choice, choose well. They only choose badly when the cost is hidden from them, and hiding it is what an unpriced yes does. It’s the same failure I described in what a project plan is actually for: the document isn’t the discipline, the conversation is.
The uncomfortable part
If your project has scope problems, the honest question isn’t “how did this get in?” It’s “who accepted it without repricing, and why did that feel easier than the conversation?” Usually the answer is that saying yes felt like service and naming the cost felt like conflict.
It’s the other way around. The unpriced yes is the disservice. It defers the conflict to the end of the project, where it’s biggest, and hands it to whoever’s standing closest when the money runs out.
Ben Webb is an Australian project leader and speaker, AIPM Project Manager of the Year 2022 and IPMA World Project Manager of the Year nominee. He writes about delivery, leadership and events.
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