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Project Management vocabulary · Scope & Requirements

Scope creep

Meaning in project management, with examples

/ˈskoʊp kriːp/nounCore term

In project management, scope creep means: The slow, uncontrolled growth of a project's scope, when new features or tasks are added without adjusting time, budget or resources.

In Turkish: kapsam kayması, kontrolsüz kapsam genişlemesi

How it is used

A common complaint in project meetings and lessons-learned sessions. Teams try to avoid, prevent or control scope creep, usually through a formal change request process.

Example sentences

  1. Every small extra request looks harmless, but together they're turning into scope creep.

  2. Scope creep added six weeks to the project, and nobody approved the extra budget.

Common collocations

  • avoid scope creep
  • control scope creep
  • cause scope creep
  • sign of scope creep
  • scopeAll the work, features and results that a project has agreed to deliver, and by extension what it will not deliver.
  • change requestA formal request to change something already agreed in the project, such as the scope, schedule or budget. It is assessed and then approved or rejected.
  • out of scopeNot part of the work that the project has agreed to deliver, so it will not be done unless the scope is formally changed.
  • triple constraintThe idea that scope, time and cost are linked, so a change to one of them, such as adding features, affects at least one of the others, with quality in the middle.

This word in other fields

The same English word can have a different meaning in another field:

More terms: Scope & Requirements

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