The Dreaded Scope Creep — Trying to Avoid the Inevitable
The Scope Creep has historical beginnings, traceable to…oh forget it. It’s just a bad pun.
Business owners pay for it. Project Managers get headaches over it. And developers say “I told you so” when it happens. Scope creep. I define it as pretty much any extra work that is required beyond the original estimates to complete a project. It reaches us all in the software development world, and not in a “good-touch” kind of way either. Like that awkward dude that makes everyone uncomfortable at parties, scope creep shows up in our projects and annoys us time and time again. “Next time…” you say, “next time, we’ll know it’s coming and we’ll budget accordingly!”
If only it were that simple.
I often like to compare building custom software to building a house, but when it comes to estimates and timeline projections, the intangible nature by which software can be created doesn’t translate so well. While it takes a sizeable team and lots of machinery to put up a building, a single programmer can spit out massive amounts of code pretty quickly. In many cases, a single developer is able to exclusively do the work required to produce a software product. On the surface, this appears to be an advantage software development has over construction. After all, how hard could it really be to reorder the steps in that automated sales funnel? And yet, we would never expect a construction crew to easily shift the kitchen location after the frame has gone up. They’ll do it, sure, but you KNOW it’ll be expensive, and add weeks to your finish date.
Having encountered issues of scope creep and changing goal posts more than once in my time with Tech Guys, I’ve pulled together a few tips and nuggets for the savvy software development shopper to bear in mind and minimize this common pain-point.
1. Careful Planning is Worth it. With all the hype and love for agile development structures (which I tend to like as well), there is still a lot to be said for spending more than a little bit of time planning and architecting a software build BEFORE churning out tons of code. Common contributors to scope creep are technology limitations discovered mid-development. These limitations can sometimes force pretty drastic overhauls to the development approach already in process, and adjusting for them can get expensive. All technology has limits, and considerable research is usually needed to ensure a given programming path is viable.
2. Know What you Need. Another common contributor to scope creep lies in change requests. “I didn’t think my sales team would need to do anything with this data, but it turns out they’ll need a way to pull reports from it when we launch in three days….” Many a developer has been here, and they all double-face-palmed as they cancelled their weekend plans. You do everyone a favor when you involve the various department heads in conversations with your software developers regarding their specific needs and your vision as part of those initial planning phases. Also, when possible, it’s better to hold off on pushing for changes and adjustments until the current iteration of a build is completed and passed over to you for feedback.
3. Over-Budget. It’s just not a good idea to bank on your development project going completely smoothly. Sometimes more QA and testing is required to resolve a particularly resilient bug. Maybe an alternative solution to support some complex logic was needed when the initial plan didn’t jive between two different software platforms in your system. Maybe you do have a crucial change that has to be included mid-development. While most software companies will tack on an extra 20% or so to their estimates to accommodate this time, extra meetings, etc, as a buyer for a custom development project, I would make sure I’ve got closer to an extra 40% padding in my budget just in case.
When it comes to building custom software solutions, completely avoiding scope creep is a pretty difficult thing to do. If your budget is so tight that potential overages in the provided estimates are going to cause excessive stress for you, or anger your CFO, it may not be the best time to move forward with the project. Development companies can help you understand the ROI and impact of the work they are proposing to do for you – which may be compelling enough to justify loosening the belt for the right kind of project.