Scope creep
Also known as: Requirement creep, Feature creep, Scope expansion
Uncontrolled growth in project requirements or activities beyond what was originally defined in the SOW.
Scope creep is the main cause of margin erosion in Fixed Price projects: small additional client requests, accepted out of courtesy or haste, pile up until effort explodes without any price increase.
Defense rests on three elements: a detailed SOW precisely describing what is in and out of scope, a formal change-request process that turns every new request into a contract amendment or upsell, and a PSA that alerts the PM when delivered hours exceed baseline. Industry studies estimate that scope creep cuts average margin by 10-20% in projects without structured change management.
The requests that cause the most damage are the ones too small to refuse. A half-day of analysis, one extra review cycle, a report in a different format: none of them justifies the friction of a change request, and twelve of them consume a fortnight nobody planned for. Counting them, rather than pricing each one, is usually what makes the pattern arguable with the client.
Detecting the drift early is mostly a matter of watching two signals that appear long before the budget does: hours booked against tasks that were not in the plan, and milestones re-baselined more than once. Both are visible in week three of a slippage, when renegotiating scope is still a normal conversation rather than an escalation.
An integration sold at 150k€ ends at 220 actual person-days vs 180 estimated: 22% scope creep, margin dropped from 32% to 12%.