Mendy Ezagui

Customer and prospect feedback is crucial. Your current customers, especially if you are introducing a new product or business line, signed up with certain expectations, and your pivot may not align with those. Additionally, while pivoting, your well-intentioned customers may not fully appreciate the scope of the change. Therefore, it's important to curate your audience and questions carefully to validate the pivot objectively.

Depending on your culture and maturity, you should use a systemized framework for prioritization to ensure accountability, facilitate retrospectives, and enhance collaboration, rather than relying on intuition. There are numerous techniques available, and in my experience, using these models, or a combination of them, can make a significant difference: MoSCoW, Weighted Shortest Job First, and Value vs. Complexity/Effort.

Before discussing how to identify scope creep, we need to first talk about how to communicate scope and what defines scope creep. Make every effort to clearly communicate the expected outcomes of the project, feature, or story to the team. This is essential for enabling the team to understand the scope—what they are working on solving. The team should continuously ask how their work drives value toward the desired outcome. Next, define scope creep. Scope creep involves adding additional time or functionality that is not aligned with the original outcomes the team is working toward. There are times when a change in scope, as long as it further supports the original outcome and does not significantly impact the timeline, may be welcome.

Whatever you choose, make sure it's reusable for other applications across the organization. If possible, integrate mock/masked data and purging record policies into middleware. Finally, consult your organization's risk and legal departments to ensure compliance with legal and ethical policies.

Whatever you choose, make sure it's reusable for other applications across the organization. If possible, integrate mock/masked data and purging record policies into middleware. Finally, consult your organization's risk and legal departments to ensure compliance with legal and ethical policies.

I've found that the most important ingredient for success is a cohesive team and healthy culture focused on maximizing value. Waterfall or Agile can succeed with that key. While Agile is better suited for best value, dysfunctional agile has folks moving very fast in the wrong direction.