I despise scope creep with every part of my being. To me, scope creep is com­pa­ra­ble to nails on a chalk board, or having my hand slammed in a door again and again and again. It is the ruiner of projects, prod­ucts, and I’m sure I could find some way to tie it into how Rock and/or Roll music is obvi­ously ruin­ing soci­ety. It takes what would in most cases be a solid project, a solid time line, and solid analy­sis, and tosses them all to the winds.

A quick, simple, and gen­er­al­ized def­i­n­i­tion: Scope Creep is when some­one (your­self or oth­er­wise) adds new func­tion­al­ity, fea­tures, or other addi­tions while still expect­ing your project/product/whatever to still be due by the same time.

I went to college.

Shock­ing, I know. I did though, and on the lovely diploma that I earned and gently stuffed in a drawer some­where it says that I am both a com­puter pro­gram­mer and a sys­tems ana­lyst. What that means is not only am I (sup­pos­edly) com­pe­tent at coding solu­tions, I am also (appar­ently) com­pe­tent at look­ing at a system and fig­ur­ing out how things should work.

I always chuck­led in my Analy­sis classes. “Come on, this is all common sense!” I would pro­claim. I took what the teacher said for a grain of salt and left it at that.