Scope creep! 🙄 Ugh! Everyone hates scope creep!

Right?

But wait a minute… what is scope creep, exactly?

Is it fair to say it’s a change to the plan? Probably. Although it’s actually more specific than that. It’s an addition to a plan.

“Actually, we need to add feature XYZ” would be scope creep, whereas I don’t think most would complain about “Instead of feature QWR, let’s do feature RTY.”

And that makes sense. I mean, sure, changing plans to build feature RTY instead of QWR might be annoying… but it’s not nearly as annoying as trying to do an EXTRA feature.

So it seems to me that the big problem with scope creep isn’t that the scope changes, it’s that priorities don’t change. Or at least, they don’t intentionally and overtly change (of course, the actual priority changes in some way… usually the priority becomes “make more, poorly implemented features as priority over making few, quality features”, but I digress…)

So what if we replaced “scope creep” with “change of priorities”?

Now it’s starting to sound a bit like responding to change… over following a plan. 🤔