What Is Scope Creep (And How to Deal With It)?

Ever been in charge of a project that suddenly felt completely out of control? A possible culprit might have been scope creep. 

What is scope creep?

Let’s start with this burning question: how to define scope creep?

Scope creep refers to the gradual, often uncontrolled expansion of a project's scope beyond its original objectives, requirements, or boundaries. This often leads to project delays, budget overruns, and team members’ burnout if not managed properly.

Whether you’re a project manager, or simply in charge of overseeing a project, it’s really important to understand what is scope creep, and how to deal with it. 

Why does scope creep happen and how to avoid it?

There’s more than one reason for a project going beyond its original scope. Here are some of the main ones. 

Unclear project goals

Whether it’s a small project, or something spanning several months - clear and specific goals are the best guideposts to keep your project on track.

The SMART (specific-measurable-achievable-realistic-time-bound) model for setting your goals is always advisable to help you avoid scope creep. 

Scope creep often happens because of improperly defined goals and/or project scope. 

For example, a team may be tasked with “launching a website”. Let’s say that the team consists of a UI/UX designer and a developer. However, midway through the project, they might realize they need custom graphics, illustrations, or even motion graphics that are beyond the scope of service of either of these two professionals. 

Additional requests

As a design company, we know this one very well. No matter how well defined a project scope is at the beginning, there’s bound to be additional requests.

A good way to avoid things getting out of hand is to leave some room for additional requests, in your budget as well as your team’s time management plan. 

Or, you can even create a full-proof model, like our on-demand design service. With a team of designers and project managers, we can always handle any additional feature, request, or revision our clients submit!

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Changes to the project plan

This is a problem many marketers face regularly.  You might have a great marketing or social media strategy in place, and then something comes up. This could be an important date you’ve overlooked, or the latest trending topic you need to get into. 

As you might suspect, this could result in significant scope creep and a total disruption of your workflow.

Of course, in most cases simply refusing to change your plan is equally harmful (e.g. imagine a brand focused on sustainability missing out on Earth Day).

So, the best way to manage scope creep successfully is to have some sort of internal control process for making changes to your plan/goals. This might involve different project stakeholders who can accurately predict how the changes will affect the results, and decide about the best course of action. 

Unrealistic project schedule

 A good project manager usually knows how much time should be dedicated to each task. So, the best way to avoid setting unrealistic deadlines is to hire a project management team to help you out.

If it’s not in the budget, you can use many of the free or affordable project management software. Although most of these won’t be able to calculate how much time you need for each task, they’ll quickly help you realize if you’ve set your expectations too high and allow you to tweak your schedule in the early stages.

Project burnout

Last, but definitely not least is an issue that essentially comes down to human nature. When working on the same project for hours, days, or even months, most of us have at some point experienced fatigue. 

Creatives might feel drained for ideas, people in customer-facing roles might feel mentally or emotionally drained. And everyone can become physically exhausted.

There’s no one way to avoid this (we discuss some handy tips in the next section). However, this is where a project management team can also help.

Creating diverse tasks on a day-to-day basis, and limiting the time spent on a specific task or portion of it, can prevent people from feeling lost or stuck. 

Helping your teammates find that optimal work-life balance can also be one of the goals of your project managers to ensure they feel motivated to work. 

Actionable tips for managing scope creep

With these very common issues, preventing scope creep is always advisable. And yet, if you still find yourself dealing with scope creep, here are a few 

Make room in your budget

Nobody likes to spend more than necessary. But unexpected expenses are always the worst.

When planning your project budget, make sure you leave a portion of it out for cost overrun. This could be the increase in prices from the moment you start planning your project to the time you need to purchase goods or services.

Or it could be that you lose project sponsors, or that the work takes longer than expected so you have to pay external collaborators (e.g. freelancers) more. 

Of course, it’s impossible to plan for every occasion. But having at least some extra money to fall back on is always a good idea.  

Set clear communication channels

Everyone who’s ever tried to understand “what is scope creep in project management” will have noticed one common theme: miscommunication.

To avoid this, make sure you have a limited number of channels. For example, our own company used three platforms for internal communication: Slack, Asana, and the ManyPixels app in which we manage design.

After a while, we realized this was causing some miscommunication and overlooked messages. So , we got rid of Asana and instead switched to Slack and Notion (for documentation purposes).

Find what works for you and make sure everyone knows what the purpose of each channel is (Slack even gives you the option to create different channels, to correspond to each of your operations/teams).

Document everything

Picture this: you’re dealing with a huge scope creep, everyone is frustrated, overworked and eager to point the finger at someone else.

To keep the peace and prevent the same issues from arising in future projects, it’s essential to keep everything well documented. Along with your project plan or roadmap, you should also keep track of daily/weekly goals and progress.

Still, remember that it’s a fine line between useful documentation and overwhelming your team with administrative tasks. Make sure you have all the documentation and procedures set up before the start of the project, to avoid piling on extra tasks in the middle of it. 

Priorize requests

Jack of all trades, master of none, as the saying goes. In project management, this usually translates to working on several projects simultaneously, and finishing none of them.

Instead, you should prioritise requests to allow maximum efficiency.

For example, if you’re designing a website, you wouldn’t start from a custom illustration for the hero section. This can take some time, and without a website mockup to work with, you might end up creating something that doesn’t fit. 

Instead, you’d start with wireframes, website navigation menu, and perhaps a color scheme that will allow you to build your website faster. 

You can also create labels for essential and non-essential tasks, to ensure you get the important stuff out of the way asap. 

Utilize project management tools

From Asana (which is truly great, despite the fact that we didn’t have a need for it) to Trello and Monday, there’s more than one project management tool out there.

To be honest, price is probably the most important factor in choosing the right tool. With so many options, and tweaks it’s possible to make virtually anything work for you. 

Educate your clients

Scope creep is especially difficult to handle if you have paying clients to answer to. Of course, very often the clients themselves are the reason for scope creep (e.g. requesting additional features).

The plain fact is that a customer/client is not always right. Especially when they have no knowledge of the process (we see this with the design process a lot). 

So a great way to avoid and manage scope creep is to educate your clients about what to do. Don’t just give them an action plan - take time to explain each stage, and the reasoning behind it. 

Once they have all the information, clients can manage their expectations better, and provide more valuable feedback and insights. 

Outsource your weaknesses 

Believe it or not, outsourcing is one of the best ways to cut project costs and avoid or manage scope creep.

According to Deloitte’s 2024 outsourcing survey, 80% of businesses are planning to maintain or increase their investment in outsourcing (besides a growing trend for insourcing and reliance on AI technology).

The top three reasons for outsourcing according to the survey are access to talent, growing customer demands, and spending optimization. All three of these areas are closely related to scope creep. 

As an on-demand design company, we know first-hand just how useful an extra pair of hands can be. We work with marketing teams, small businesses and startups, even a few big corporations. Our task is to deliver high-quality design, faster and at a lower cost than most freelancers or traditional design agencies would charge. 

So, what have our 7+ years of experience taught us?

Long-term partnerships make all the difference.

We offer monthly subscriptions that give our clients the flexibility to pause or cancel anytime. Nevertheless, the greatest results (time and cost savings) are achieved in the long term. 

With a team of designers on hand, our clients are able to make last-minute changes and requests, speed up production and receive more variations and different types of designs (many agencies use this as a white-label solution for their own clients). 

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Conclusion

We hope this helps to answer your questions about what is project scope creep, and how to manage it effectively.

You can hire a professional project manager, but it also pays to know a few things about this yourself so that you can assess the effectiveness of your project management team and adapt as needed.

If you came here wondering “what is project scope creep” because of bottlenecks in your design, don’t worry. ManyPixels provides a simple, affordable, and fast solution for all your design needs - from marketing designs, and branding, to websites, print designs, and motion graphics!

Get started today and submit your first request - most designs take just 1-2 business days to complete, so you could get your first design back tomorrow!

Do you have any questions? Feel free to book a free 1:1 consultation to ask us any questions, and see if ManyPixels is the right solution for your team.