A student of mine recently asked me how to manage a particular situation. She is the tech lead on a Salesforce project and the client is notorious for scope creep.
The discovery phase of the project was quite extensive, and included both the client’s IT team and business users.
During the delivery phase, and in the middle of a sprint, the IT team announced the following: The entire [Other Address] field on the Contact needs to be required, and just the [Country] field needs to be required for all Contact and Account addresses.
Let’s set aside whether this is actually a good idea or not, and let’s focus on a reply.
My student’s initial response was going to be, “This is a new requirement and you can’t just add a new requirement in the middle of a sprint. We need to table this and discuss it with the full group of stakeholders [i.e. power users] at our next backlog grooming meeting.”
I suggested the following wording.
“That’s an interesting idea and I thank you for sharing it. As we’ve done with all other potential improvements during the implementation phase, let’s add it to the backlog for a subsequent phase. Then we’ll be able to tirage as a team, this according to priority and impact. I’m sure we’ll both agree this helps us reduce scope creep and focus on delivering the current stories.”
The “trick” is ending the message with something that’s hard to disagree with. The client focuses on the last sentence more than the previous ones. And by agreeing to a very reasonable statement, they implicitly agree with the entire message.
Someone called this “forced teaming”. Use it only for only for good 🙂
The takeaways
– It’s important to validate someone’s opinion and don’t simply discard it because of reasons.
– One way to control scope creep is by focusing on the now. It’s important to finish one thing before starting another.