When do you blow the scope creep whistle? [closed]

Question

Most people have been here at some point or another - in your project, you get really small requests along the way that you're happy to take care of, but at some point the little things add up. Sometimes it takes less time to implement something than it does to re-negotiate the project plan.

Providing the spec/requirements plan is decent and it isn't a doomed project to start with, at what point do you actually blow the whistle and start re-negotiating? At any request? When that request requires additional pages / forms? Or just feel it out? Would love to hear how you make the call.

Answer 1

Budget N hours of ad-hoc requests in your project plan. (You know it's going to happen, so why isn't it in there?) Then track your ad-hoc requests and renegotiate when the budget's blown.

Answer 2

At any request?

The real goal is to make the customer happy while not getting ripped off, right? Agile methods address these issues to a large extent. New requirements always come up, and if you don't address them as they come you end up building things that are obsolete or dysfunctional out of the box. So what you need is customer buy-in to the process, a working prototype as soon as possible, and lots of iterating. There's a ton more, of course, but that should be enough to be getting on with.

Edited to add: Customer buy-in means they are aware of you working on a new feature instead of whatever you would be doing, and that they are in agreement. When you've gone through your schedule and budget and still aren't done they they've been there with you the whole way and know why. No big surprise "What? You're not DONE?!"