Scope Creep

This can actually fall into many categories. Scope creep is when the initial project plan morphs into something you could not have anticipated, often thanks to last minute "emergencies" and clients changing their minds.

As a customer service oriented organization, it is easy to say "yes, no problem." A better response, based upon the estimated budget and a signed contract which explicitly discusses overages, is "yes, no problem. That will cost an additional $4,000. How would you like to proceed?"

See the difference?

Which response you give has to do with how you have structured your financial terms with the client.

Here are a few semi-autobiographical examples (the names have been changed to protect the guilty!):

Client XYZ

We shot a re-make of an older video, approx 90 minutes running time. The client provided little feedback on the transcript for the original video, aside from "yeah, let's shoot it." The agreed upon deliverable was a DVD, perhaps with chapters.

The first edit took a couple of weeks - we made it match the original video, except with more up to date graphics and narration.

Client sees it and says "oh, now that we see it, there are a bunch of changes we need to make - oh and the logo that appears in some of the shots on some of the products has actually been changed because we are in the process of changing the name of our company - nobody told you? You should have known this."

We rotoscoped or cropped out the logo on shots where we did not have another angle, and through hours of meetings with product managers who were oddly absent from the shoot, rewrote much of the program. We also shot some new material to fill in the holes created by the new scripting.

It was at this point that the DVD became a CD-ROM (not enough of the sales team have DVD players in their laptops (alas, this was 2005, by 2008 they are likely to want a DVD after all - cha-ching ). The simple CD-ROM menu became non-simple, with the addition of sub-menus to further complicate the user's experience.

All of the above is more or less included in our proposed budget, which was accepted. What was left out was a clause for revisions and hours beyond the estimate, which we had passed weeks ago. Thus, once we started re-designing the CD-ROM interface and navigation, the clock started ticking. Although we had to go to the client and say "you are over budget." That does not always go well.

Here's where things got really scope creepy, or perhaps, scope creepier. The CD navigation was pretty locked down, but now that they have seen the video all chopped up, they are noticing more changes. Making changes to a video when it is one complete program is fairly straightforward. However when the client needs to be sent a new CD just to check one edit in one of 50 MPEG clips, things can quickly get out of hand.

Here's another fictionalized yet overall reality based example:

Another re-make of a video, one we actually had made years earlier. Again, we transcribed the original video to make a script, and had some rudimentary revisions to the script. No problem there, so we went about the shoot. We actually could shoot everything we needed for this video in about 3 hours. At the end of the 3 hours, one of the people on the set noticed some technicality which could impact approval, so we re-shot almost everything. Better to catch it in the field.

So next we edit the video - takes about a month given the graphics heavy didactic education, along with some temporary 2d animation. The video gets reviewed by various experts and with a few minor revisions is approved. We send it to another expert, the one whose facility we used - this person was not happy. "We cannot approve this video (not their job to approve it incidentally, but they are members in good regard within the society we work with) so they make a bunch of suggestions and they even use their own video camera to re-shoot a few sequences. Our other experts take a look at everythng and agree that we should make changes - a lot of changes. We basically recut the whole video - thank gods we have digital editing (so say we all).

The video actually came out great, and everyone agreed it was better as a result of the year long struggle to get everyone on the same page, and we actually sell a lot of them. Since we are the client, along with our partner, the production costs come out of our own pocket. This does not alleviate the fact that things could have gone more smoothly.

Here we are in 2008 and our workflow continues to evolve with each completed project. Now we anticipate clients changing their minds, and are not surprised when we get e-mails saying "is it too late to change this from a DVD to a filmstrip/audio tape set?"

The main points to remember are to build changes into a contract, either as a maximum number of hours of work included in the price, or as a set fee per hour of work beyond the contract price, or both. As you work with particular clients or groups over time, you can anticipate the particular types of changes, scope creep or emergencies that may arise, and to be prepared. Sometimes being prepared is as simple as saying to yourself or your colleagues, "yeah, we figured this would happen" or "hmm, that's too bad. Oh well, the meter's runnin' "

Thanks for reading.

Mike Cohen