How to tell a project manager “NO” to scope creep [closed]

Answer 1

By having good costing and feature design for what is in scope, taking it back to them and asking if they want to move the date out, or cut other features. If the latter, what features are no longer important that haven't been started yet?

Answer 2

Chances are, while you suppose that your project manager has a 'pernicious love of sneaking in "scope creep" when they can', his perspective is probably different. It is probably more productive to make sure you understand his point of view.

This is of course in addition to communicating your own point of view, namely the consequences of the scope creep. You probably need to explicitly identify the additional work in your development plan, estimate how long the additional work will take, and explain that this means a delay or dropping some other feature.

This only works if your estimates are any good. This does not work if you do the additional work off the books, so that the additional time spent is not visible. Otherwise, you might meet the deadline for other reasons, such as harder work or efficiency gains, and your project manager will just remember that scope creep did not affect the delivery date 'last time'.

Answer 3

If you want to succeed in your organization, you will want to be a team player and should strive to demonstrate your commitment. Sometimes, this means putting in some extra time to get a great new suggestion into the product.

However, you are more likely to command respect by placing firm limits on what can reasonably be expected of you. One way to do this is by helping managers to understand that they are not going to improve a product by engaging in scope-creep but that they are more likely to hurt the product in the long run.

Answer 4

A good rule of thumb is to always answer, "Okay. What should we drop to get this in by the deadline?" and/or "Okay. If we move the deadline to X, we can add that in."

Every change affects completion time. There's no such thing as a zero-time task. Forcing a project manager to realize that quality, deadline, or feature list will suffer every time they make a change will go a long way towards getting them to think right about scope creep.