What to do when your superior wants everything, in addition to the kitchen sink

I would love for the simple answer to be to say “No.” To stand up for your project plan and combat the forces of evil that are work­ing tire­lessly to ruin your brain-​child. Unfor­tu­nately saying no gen­er­ally lands you in the dog house with your supe­rior, or fired and replaced with some­one who may or may not be your better.

Many of us know that taking the direct approach will gen­er­ally land us in the unem­ploy­ment line, and so people gen­er­ally tend to do noth­ing. I’m not saying it doesn’t work, but I can say that you have to be on very good terms with who­ever you are deal­ing with if you want to pull a stunt like this. For the record: clients like this even less than bosses, so you can easily swap the two. If the client drops you because of your nay nay atti­tude, you could still end up in the unem­ploy­ment line making my visual just as real.

So what can you do?

Talk it through

You can always try and talk them out of it, or at the very least dis­cuss the valid­ity of adding their new bauble to the project at all, let alone so late into it. This option is usu­ally attempted in the “last-ditch” phase of every­thing, which is a shame because that is when it is least useful. Try this tactic first if only for the fact that it poses the least amount of back­lash. The ensu­ing dis­cus­sion could actu­ally lead to dif­fer­ent approaches or insights that may actu­ally help you with the newest addi­tion, or even another part of your project. You may end up doing it, but at least every­one knows where they stand.

Bargain.

This doesn’t always work, but it is gen­er­ally worth a shot. The most pain­less and the eas­i­est to approach, try bar­gain­ing with your client/boss to see if you can avoid their addi­tion, or add it to a later release. I sug­gest the latter because if the sug­ges­tion isn’t utterly retarded, then you have a goal for the next release which will make every­one happy. If, how­ever, it is bat-​shit insane to add then try and talk them down from their idea.

Make sure the request isn’t documented anywhere, and other devious things

This way you can “forget” either will­ingly or by taking advan­tage of your piss-​poor memory. I don’t per­son­ally sug­gest this because unless your cli­boss (made it up, and I’m going with it) shares your gold­fish memory, they’ll prob­a­bly neglect to men­tion it until you think you’ve gotten away with your scheme, and now you’re stuck doing the late shift. This will also prob­a­bly make you look like an idiot, and send you down on the food­chain. From what I have seen, expe­ri­enced, and oth­er­wise know, I can hon­estly say that sub­terfuge works the least in almost any pro­fes­sional situation.Unless you’re a pro­fes­sional con-​man, you’re prob­a­bly going to be seen right through. Save your­self the agony and try a more legit­i­mate approach.

Suck it up buttercup

You could of course do the work. This is an option, and one that many people are stuck doing. Some­times you can’t get out of it, and it will hurt you inside every time. This is doubly so if it is legit­i­mately your fault. If you missed some­thing in your analy­sis phase, it makes you feel more like a moron when you’re burn­ing that mid­night oil to meet your cliboss’ (still using it) expec­ta­tions. An easy way to help avoid this is to make sure you do a solid and thor­ough job on your infor­ma­tion gath­er­ing and analy­sis. Make sure you involve the required par­ties to actu­ally cover the angles needed. This won’t stop scope creep every time, but at the very least you can be safe and sure that it is not of your doing. Bit­ter­ness is better when it’s not directed at yourself.

Stick with “No”

If none of those work, you can still say no. The only way this can work is to back up your neg­a­tiv­ity with solid proof that by includ­ing fea­ture X into your doodad, you will not be able to hit the dead­line. You’ll gen­er­ally need to back this up with graphs, num­bers, and strong rea­sons as to why it can’t be done. You’ll still get the skunk eye, but at least you can feel better know­ing that you can back up your stance with infor­ma­tion to sup­port you. This also has the added bonus of making sure that some­one in charge is informed, which takes much of the respon­si­bil­ity out of your hands. Granted this may not add up to doing any­thing more than wast­ing time, because some times the addi­tion just has to be in there. It sucks, but some­times you’re boned either way.

Some­times you’ll end up get­ting screwed over and end up work­ing late or what­ever you need to do to get the job done. It’s not really avoid­able in ever sce­nario. You can limit how often it hap­pens though. The best way is to make sure you’ve cov­ered your bases through­out the entire process with sign-​offs and cli­boss inter­ac­tion. The more they are involved from the start the more per­sonal respon­si­bil­ity they will feel, and the more infor­ma­tion you can work with from the get go.