How to Manage Client Scope Creep

This post is the result of a good conversation with Abhishek at a recent event. 

He asked how we managed to ensure that there was no scope creep. My projects have usually been on track and within budget, and as Abhishek mentioned, client scope creep is one of the major reasons why large IT projects go out of budget or schedule. 

So, if you are a budding project manager responsible for client management, here is the secret to building great client solution and even better client relationships. 

Most client scope creep comes from 2 areas: 

A. Complex Workflows, where more approval levels are added. 

B. Reports 

The first thing you have to remember when dealing with client scope creep is that they are not trying to trouble you. Their intention is not the squeeze the juice out of you. Their intention is to do the best that they can for their company at the least possible price. 

Surprise! That is your intention too! 

Most vendor PMs do not understand this intention and objective synergy. But when you do, you realise that you and the client PM are on the same side, trying to do the same thing. 

The only thing is, we are using two different approaches to do it. 

So, Step One:

Establish Commonality of Purpose 

Sit down with your client and establish commonality of purpose. Both of you are working towards the same thing: 

A. Create the best possible solution

B. In the least possible time 

C. At the least possible cost

Once it has been stated, it appears intuitive. Yet, until we say it out and put it on the table, it is not so apparent to the other party. In fact, if you wait at the water cooler long enough, you will definitely hear the Project Managers from both sides cribbing. The Client PM usually says one or more of the following: 

• The vendor does not want to do any work or wants to do shoddy work and get away with it. 
• They are not doing enough KT 
• Even for small change they give such a huge estimate, and change request for everything! 
• They just don't understand our business and requirements. I don't know how to explain. 

The Vendor PM will usually say one or more of the following: 

• The Client is really miserly. 
• They always underestimate the time it will take to do something. 
• They are paying us for a cow and want us to make an elephant. 
• They don't understand how the system works. 
• They have such weird requirements! Who works like this? 

So, the step of establishing commonality of purpose is the most important one. It establishes trust and ensures that you row on the same direction, not in opposite directions. 

Once commonality of purpose is established, the next thing is to understand where scope creep is coming from. 

Step Two: 

Diagnose and Guide 

Most scope creep comes from the two areas I have mentioned above. You do your own diagnosis on your projects and understand WHERE the scope creep is coming. And then ask yourself WHY. 

What problem is the client trying to solve by doing this extra work? 

Let's get straight to taming the beast. 

Step Three 

Managing Scope Creep and Making Great Friends 

Here is the most important tip anyone will ever share with you on managing scope creep. It is so important that I am going to write it in caps. 

START WITH YES. 

Whenever the client asks you whether something can be done, NEVER start the conversation with No. if you know that it can be done, start with, "Yes". If you are not sure, start with "We will try to find a way to do this." 

Managing Workflow Complications

Most clients who try to add additional approval and exception workflows are basically trying to tame one beast - Compliance. 

That is the core objective. 

Start the conversation by saying - My work ends with doing the coding. Your work starts after that and goes on forever. So, my work is the shorter one. Let's talk about how this will work after go live in your business. Let's discuss a few scenarios and understand how much additional work it will add for your users, and what you are doing about it now. 

After that, listen. Let them explain all their use cases and exceptions. Understand their compliance needs thoroughly and most importantly, understand how users manage exceptions now. A system that can be excepted by the user in an emergency will eventually be excepted as a matter of course. The user's onboarding learning curve is slow, but their bypassing learning curve for any system is amazingly steep. So, if you make it necessary for users to bypass the system for one thing, they will be bypassing it for most things sooner than you realise. 

After the client has finished putting their requirements on the table, don your product specialist hat (or get your product specialists on board) and design a solution that meets their needs without being overly complicated. I can assure you that most workflows can be simplified. 

Pro Tip: For each workflow step, ask your client: 

• How will this step increase the transaction load of the user? 

Let's understand this with a real life example: 

Let's say that the client wants all travel to go to the department head. The questions we ask then are: 

A. How many travel requests will the DH have to approve in a day? Week? Month? How much time will it take them to approve each (assume reading time). If we go with 5 a week and 5 minutes per TR, that's 25 minutes of extra work per week. For an already stretched executive. 

Next, ask them how they plan to manage situations that are definitely going to arise - the executive on leave, too busy, traveling himself, etc. 

Usually, in such cases, a thing called Delegation of Authority is used. 

Let the client think about that. And then help them understand how to balance compliance with minimum transaction load on the users. 

• What value is this step adding to your process? 

The most frequent response to this is "It gives us better control" or "Compliance." 

Do not resist. After the client says this, sit back in silence and let them think. 

If they do not appear to be making headway, ask gently, "Are you creating a better process, or are you helping someone do CYA? Think about that. If the system can be hacked, it will neither lead to better compliance nor control. Every new control element you put in there is also a hacking opportunity. Think about the real business value of every step. And its real objective." 

Always be mindful of the client's imperatives. 99% of the times, clients see the difference between business value and CYA. But some cultures are necessarily CYA cultures. In those cultures, you can only help the client by perpetuating the CYA culture. Do that. 

And most importantly, NEVER disrespect the client - neither in public with your team, nor in private in your head. A Lot of delivery managers and PMs get together to laugh at clients in private. The client does not know tech as well as you do, and you don't know business as well as they do. Further, respect cannot be faked. Come from a place of real understanding, and you will create synergy. Come from a place of negotiation, and you will create a tug of war. I am still in touch with client PMs who worked with me 15 years ago, and more. 

Managing Reports 

Report requirements are the biggest headache for most PMs. The client wants to extract every element of data being put (or not put) into the system in about 15 reports on average (that's a joke, not a statistic). 

So, how does one tame the report monster? 

There are, once again, 2 simple questions that one asks the client. 

Since I have dealt with dashboard design and report management in another post, will just quickly state the 2 questions here: 

A. Who will enter this data? 

Request the client to go through their entire data flow process (you can use a proprietary methodology I have listed elsewhere on this blog - the Data River Diagram) and have them understand how the data will flow into the system in the first place. 

Is there enough reliability of that data for us to use it in reporting? 

B. What decision will it aid / How will you use it? 

Every pixel on an executive dashboard is important. Every second of executive time is important. If a data element is making it to reporting, it must help the user do one of the following: 

A. Monitor and control 

B. Diagnose and Correct 

C. Predict and Decide 

If the report is not fulfilling one of these 3 objectives, it should not be there. 

Your clients will truly appreciate your trying to create reports and dashboards that are relevant for the long term. 

In fact, invest some time in creating a report library that you know helps other organisations create effective dashboard and reporting interfaces, then proactively share it with clients. Will significantly shorten the cycle time and will also help the client see value in your work. 

So, are there any best practices that have helped you deliver better business value to your clients? Do share! 

Meme I made today

 

Story Of My Life

Everyone's life has repetitive patterns. I have finally identified the repetitive pattern of my life. 

Loop

 

Step 1: Duniya ka sabse vahiyaat idea dimaag mein aana

Step 2: Idea ka keeda ban jana.

Step 3: I open big mouth and share idea

Step 4: Everyone now expects me to implement the idea

Step 5: Implement idea and die of overwork.

 

If Dead:

          <Put Cremation>

Else

          <Repeat Cycle>

 

End Loop

Us Samay ka karoonga kya? - One of the most important stories of my life

एक समय की बात है। मिस्र में एक अंग्रेज काहिरा की ओर जा रहा था। रास्ते में उसे एक अकेला बूढ़ा आदमी  चलता हुआ मिला। अंग्रेज को दया आ गई। उसने अपनी गाड़ी रोक कर उस बूढ़े आदमी से पूछा, "आप कहाँ जा रहे हैं?" 

"काहिरा जा रहा हूँ।" वृद्ध ने उत्तर दिया। 

पता नहीं वृद्ध के व्यक्तित्व में क्या आकर्षण था, अंग्रेज़ ने न्योता दिया, "आइए, मेरी गाड़ी में बैठ जाइए। मैं आपको ले चलता हूँ। आपके पूरे पाँच दिन बच जाएंगे।" 

वृद्ध पहले हतप्रभ हुआ, फिर धीरे से मुस्कुरा कर ना की मुद्रा में सर हिलाते हुए कहा - "पर पाँच दिन बचा कर मैं उस समय का करूंगा क्या?" - ऐसा कह कर, वृद्ध ने अंग्रेज़ से विदा ली और चलने लगा। 

ये मेरे जीवन की सबसे महत्वपूर्ण कथाओं में से है। समय और पैसा, किसी गेम करन्सी जैसे हैं। जब हम कोई गेम खेलते हैं, तो उसका पैसा उसी गेम में कमाते हैं, और वहीं खर्च करते हैं। उस पैसे को गेम के बाहर न तो लाया जा सकता है, न ही उसका गेम के बाहर कोई मोल है। 

हमारे जीवन में भी, पैसा और समय, ऐसे ही हैं। इस जीवन के बाहर, न तो उनका कोई मोल है, न उन्हें ले जाया जा सकता है। समय बचाना तो अच्छी बात है। पर उस समय का करोगे क्या, यह और भी महत्वपूर्ण है। 

पैसा कमाना और संजोना, दोनों अच्छी बातें हैं, पर उस पैसे का प्रयोजन क्या है, उसका उपयोग क्या है, यह और भी महत्वपूर्ण है। 

पाँच दिन बचाकर, हम करेंगे क्या? 

अमूमन गेम में हम उस XP और पैसे को खर्च कर के, कुछ सीख लेते हैं। जीवन का भी ऐसा ही है। उस पैसे और समय (XP) को तो गेम से बाहर नहीं ले जाया जा सकता, पर गेम खेलते खेलते हम जो सीखते हैं, उसे साथ ले जाया जा सकता है।   

Why we chose Judgify.me as our Contest Management Platform

We wanted to do a start-up contest for students. That meant that we needed a contest management software. 

The first step was to search for a WP plugin that offered an end to end contest management. We did find a few but they needed integrations, or were missing some key functionality. 

Next, we evaluated YouNoodle. 

Younoodle was already the platform being used by another startup contest where I was on the jury. The UX was so bad that we put it in the negative list almost immediately. 

After this, we came to the final step - yes, SaaS: An external platform that offers end to end contest management functionality. 

Our key asks were: 

A. Good UX, because this was for young students. We didn't want a data heavy, clunky UX. 

B. Flexibility. 

C. Ease of use 

D. Privacy 

E. Functionality - Assignment of Judges, Judges should be able to view and score online. 

F. Admin should be able to assign judges, see when they have scored, who needs nudging, and download scores, etc. 

G. User experience should be intuitive and easy. 

In the end, it was between 2 platforms : 

A. Dare2Compete 

B. Judgify 

Dare2Compete is a full fledged, feature-rich platform that caters to end to end contest management. The other thing that worked in favour of dare2compete was that it takes 3% processing fee for fees collected and also gives us access to its own native set of users. All events are manually checked by a review team before being approved, so that quality of contests available is also quite good. 

Judgify.me, on the other hand, appears to be a more recent platform. 

Eventually, we chose Judgify.me over Dare2compete. For those of you looking for a SaaS platform for contest management, this experience might be useful. 

• Friendly URL

Our URL was simply judgify.me/empower. This is easy to remember. It was customisable. A friendly url makes a world of difference to user experience for participants. 

• The creation process

The contest creation process at Dare2compete is very thorough. It is also long and does not allow us to save as draft. One event creation takes 30 minutes. It took 3 efforts to create a single event. 

• The event review process 

This, I thought, was a plus with Dare2compete.com. It builds the credibility of the platform. The review takes under 24 hours, and ensures that the quality of contests (and by extension, the quality of participants) we get is likely to be good. Judgify.me had no review process. Since we did not depend on the audience at judify.me, it did not impact our experience of the platform in any way. If we had wanted to borrow audience, we might have given Dare2compete more weightage. We did list the event there though, and got 6 registrations, none of which paid the registration fee. So the audience premium did not really translate for us. 

• The UX - Contest Participant 

Clearly, this was the clincher. The UX of Judgify.me for a contest participant is very easy, intuitive, and flexible. It allows the user to: 

   A. Partially enter their data. 

   B. Save entry as draft. 

   C. Make changes after submission. 

 

We found that the screen flow was very intuitive, did not involve a lot of learning for the user, and was neither clunky nor field heavy. There weren't so many fields that a person gets intimidated, nor so few that we can't get the information we need. 

• The UX - Jury 

When I tested the Jury interface, it was so perfect! When we register on Dare2Compete, we find that the jury member gets an email saying "password reset required." The jury member would and should not click on such an email. One does not password reset on a platform where they have never registered. We asked support if we could change the content of the email OR suppress it entirely. They said that both are not possible. That was a deal-breaker. That was not the experience that we wanted our jury members to have. In this day of security consciousness, password reset is absolutely the most unacceptable subject line to have. 

• Admin UX 

The Admin UX is adequate in both. There is some learning curve and some manual work that needs to be done. In Judgify.me, some jury members did not receive the emails and asked us to change the email id. So, I had to create them as a new entry. But overall, the Admin UX is fairly intuitive and we found it to be better than in Dare2Compete. 

• Support Responsiveness 

Another super important area for any event organiser. On this front, Judgify.me wins hands down. 

Disclaimer: In spite of being an Agile PM for over a decade, i am never in a hurry. When we raise a support ticket, we always have at least a 10 hour window for its solution. So, if responsiveness means 5 minutes or less, or if you are the kind of organiser for whom everything is L1, this rating may not be useful. 

Dare2Compete was only available on email, with an average response time of 24 hours. Further, there was no continuity in the messages. 

Judgify.me had a much shorter response time. But what was better was that even though it was only emails, one knew that one was talking to a real person (Joseph, in my case) and there was continuity. 

Expect an average response time of 2-5 hours. 

So, that is the story of how we chose our contest management platform. 

The Currency of a Family

I have been thinking about currencies other than money that run the world. We make the mistake of thinking of money as the only currency of the world. In recent months, I have been studying the economy of love and its quite staggering. This led me to observe other human transactions and ask - what is being exchanged here? 

So, what is the currency of a family? What is exchanged between members?

I think that the currency of a family is mutual respect and unselfish love. What we make in money is only important up to a point. Which is why we find so little correlation between happy, close-knit families and their earning status.

Once we understand this, so many things begin to make sense. 

This is the reason why the breadwinner concept is limited. We have taught ourselves that the breadwinner is someone whose sole contribution to the family is earning money. This leads to people in their 40s being lonely within their own families, unable to have conversations or form connections. What you bring in terms of money, what you do in terms of household work, are all important contributions. But they are not the currency of the family. 

The currency of the family is not the good house. It is the memories built in that house. If you are never there to build those memories, no exchange is possible. 

The currency is not the work of dishwashing. It is the conversations that happen while doing dishwashing. Which is why a parent and child who share chores will have a deeper bond than those who do things for their children. The chore is not the currency. The feeling of loving and being loved back. That is what is being exchanged. 

When a parent brings home something bought from their hard earned money, the currency is not the thing or the money used to buy it. The currency is the feeling of being loved enough that someone remembers to bring something you like, and the ability to reciprocate that love, because that reciprocation will be welcomed. 

This is why rich people have children who do not value the parents for their wealth. And super efficient mothers are surprised when they hear from their adult children - "But you were never THERE!" 

Once we understand the currency of a system (in this case, family), we are able to make meaningful exchanges that enrich everyone in the ecosystem. Because, as everyone knows, the more currency changes hands, the richer every one gets. :) 

Why do working parents feel unappreciated? 

It is not enough to make the sacrifice. The members must know that this is a sacrifice for you. This is where many working moms falter. They are forever in a mommy guilt trip, but they never share it with the family. So, the family does not realise that the parent is going through an inner turmoil. Likewise for the father who does not want to be away, but is. 

Thoughts?

My first published story

 Pahaadi Gaanv ka Iskool – Rashmi Bansal – India's Best Business Books Author

Am so kicked!