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Managing scope creep

Effectively handle and communicate scope changes internally and externally

Updated over a week ago

🕰️ Est. Time: 3 minutes

🎯 Goal: Achieve better control over unexpected project scope changes

🔑 Requirements: Access to view and edit jobs

What is scope creep?


Scope creep happens when additional work is introduced to a project without adjusting time, budget, or resources. It often starts with small requests "just one more revision" or "can we add this feature?" but can quickly lead to overwork, delays, and reduced profitability.

Why it matters


Thinking about how you'll handle scope creep early on can help manage time, budgets and client expectations.

  • Keeps projects on schedule and prevents last-minute surprises

  • Ensures work is appropriately priced and resourced

  • Prevents burnout from unplanned work piling up

Identifying scope creep


Spotting scope creep early can help keep your project on track and prevent minor changes from adding up to significant disruptions.

Ask yourself:
✔️ Has extra work been requested that wasn’t in the original plan?
✔️ Will this impact deadlines, workload, or costs?
✔️ Have similar requests happened before on this project?

Handling scope changes effectively


Once changes are identified, how you handle and communicate them with the client is key to maintaining transparency and controlling project costs.

Adjust timelines and budgets

  • Use Streamtime to modify job dates, hours, and pricing in response to changes

  • Create updated quotes for sign off before delivering additional work

Communicate with your team

  • Pause jobs, phases or items while agreeing scope changes

  • Notify team members about changes and adjustments as soon as possible to ensure alignment

Client conversation template

We know that pushing back on clients isn't the easiest so here's a template to help you get started:

"We’d love to help with this! Since this wasn’t part of the agreed scope, we can either adjust the timeline to accommodate or discuss additional budget. Let us know what works best for you."

Reducing scope creep in the future


Managing scope creep isn’t just about saying "no", it’s about setting clear expectations, tracking changes, and having a structured way to evaluate and communicate adjustments. This helps maintain profitability, avoid burnout, and keep clients informed.

Here are some preventative measures you can use in the future:

  • Use detailed job plans and send quotes for approval

  • Track actual vs planned time to spot patterns across projects and clients

  • Set clear limits on revisions - how many, what's included, any deadlines

  • Clarify extra costs early - explain changes outside of the original scope will affect pricing and timings

  • Regularly review job progress against both time and budget

How do I handle overtime?


If your team are working overtime on deliverables within Streamtime, there are a few ways this can be handled across your job.

Tracking Overtime against the original Item

The first way to handle overtime within Streamtime is to log this time against the original item, and add a note to the item to signify this is overtime worked. This allows you to track the total hours used against the item vs the planned hours in a really simple way, by grouping all the hours together, and utilising notes to differentiate between your planned hours and your overtime.

To add a note to your to do ahead of logging, follow the steps below:

  • In the To Do Screen, click ‘add new’

  • Find your job

  • Select your item

  • Within the notes field, add a note for ‘overtime’

  • Save & log the to do

Tracking Overtime against an additional Item

Another method of tracking overtime is to add an additional item into the job. Your new item could be an extension of your existing item, so for example this could be ‘Pitching - Overtime’.

It’s important to note that using this method will mean that your hours would be logged against a separate item, which makes profitability and utilisation reporting more difficult, as your job would look to be in the green, despite actually being over-utilised.

For this reason, we would always suggest using the above method of adding a note against additional hours tracked against the original item.

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