 Today, I'm going to talk to you about how to prevent scope creep by embracing change. Is everybody familiar with what a Wapu is? Is anyone not familiar with what a Wapu is? Okay. Wapu is this little creature. This particular Wapu is a villain Wapu. I didn't know there were villain Wapus, but if you want to see all the Wapus that they've ever done, go to Wapo.us. That's the fellow that's upstairs. What's his name? John? James. Yes. And I have many pins, but anyway, this is the villain scope creep Wapu because we all know scope creep is our enemy. All right. So a little bit about me. I have to look at my notes. Let me tell you this. Here's the thing. That picture obviously doesn't look like me because that was 10 years ago I did a little theater work and that was my professional head shot, but I think I look good so I leave it up. But when you get up as an actress and you pretend to be another character, there's like no nervousness because you're pretending to be somebody else. But when you're up here as yourself and talking to your peers, it makes one a little nervous. So I wanted to make sure that I got the right stuff. That's why I said I needed to check my notes. Okay. So I first got into WordPress. I spent 25 years in IT consulting as a business analyst and I left that job in 2016. I left the corporate world in 2016. But earlier than that, I got involved with WordPress because I was trying to build a web app. Remember when the couponing thing was so big in 2008, 2009, 10, everybody was trying to save money, save money, save money. Well, I'm not a couponer. So I wanted to create a web app that would just tell me where my crap was on sale, right? The stuff that I always buy. So I started creating this web app. I had a .NET programmer helping me as a friend of mine. Well, he got a girl for it. So he was never available anymore. And I said, please, please, Chris, there's got to be a better way. I'm a technical person. I know you can give me something to let me do this myself. And he said, he sent me jimla. Anybody familiar with jimla? Guys, the craziest, I just threw up my hands and said, isn't it? I know there's got to be a better solution, and that's when I found WordPress. That web app was called Max My Shopping. My website's still up. I have intentions of going back to it with a different intent, but there's really nothing of value on it at this point. But it did win third place at the first time Triad Startup Weekend was held in the Triad area of North Carolina. You can find me just about everywhere at wproadmaps.com. And now I help WordPress practitioners, and I call them practitioners because developer, designer, implementer, integrator, whatever piece you're doing, if you're also managing projects, then you're my audience because I'm helping WordPress practitioners learn more about project management and productivity management. Okay, so what are you going to learn today? And I'm sorry, you know, that nervous thing makes my mouth real dry. Okay, so I'm going to tell you what you're going to learn today. What is scope creep? Does anybody not know what scope creep is? Okay, huh? Your life, how the projects, how projects do creep, proof that it works, that this, what I'm getting ready to share with you works. How to embrace change, elements of a good change control process, and the magic of the change budget. Okay, so what is scope creep? Pure and simple, it's when your WordPress project goes into areas that you had not planned for that to happen. That you didn't previously agree on with the client. And how does a WordPress project creep? Usually lack of clarity, not enough definition of the requirements and the specifications for the website. Beginning design and development way too early, before you have all those details. Over promising with an unrealistic completion date. And I know we've all done this, just to get the job. Gold plating disguised as over delivering, and I'm going to tell you a little bit more about what gold plating is in just a minute. But these are the typical ways that a WordPress project will creep. Here's an example of how clients create scope creep. Is it too late to add four more floors? Is it too late to add 12 more pages? Is it too late to add a store? I've had these things happen at the very end of a project. So this is one way that clients create scope creep. Another way is, I'm sure I told you about that. And I thought it was included in your quote. Since you didn't make it clear it wasn't included, you need to include it anyway. Have you ever heard this? I've heard it. That's one way that it happens. And then you go the extra mile because you just want to keep the job. You don't want to lose the job. I know we were late in providing this content to you, but you can still get it done by ex-date, right? It's another thing, another unrealistic expectation and how clients create scope creep. Oops, sorry. Your primary subject matter expert had to leave, but I'm going to let his secretary help you now. Well, if that secretary doesn't have the same skill set that your subject matter expert had, you're in trouble. So that is also a way that projects can, that scope can creep. Because scope creep, we always think of scope creep as just requirements, but it's not. If your resources change and your plans were you had the senior programmer and now you gotta use a junior programmer. That's still scope creep because it's outside of what you originally planned. Okay, common ways you can create scope creep in your own project. And most often this is gold plating. And that's throwing something in because you think it's cool. You think the client will like it. They didn't ask for it. It's not a business requirement. You just think it's cool, so you throw it in. It's a waste of money and a waste of time. I had some, I forget who I was talking to this weekend, went into a big long story about that, about how they threw all this stuff in. And nobody ever used it. It was somebody big like go daddy. I can't remember who it was, but they put all this functionality in and then nobody ever used it because they didn't ask the customer on the front end. Okay, here's another way we do it. That's just a small change. I'll just do it, only take me five minutes. And then the next one's five minutes and the next one's five minutes. And then when the client has something they're gonna want you to do it for free again, hell, you threw that other thing in, right? So just do it. The change control process takes too long. We'll just do this so we can meet the project plan. Another mistake, because if you have a change, and here's the biggest problem, is that most people have a change control process in their business. They don't stick to it. It has to be without exception, no matter how small the change is, because that's what sets the proper expectation for the client. We'll just go ahead and start, even though we don't have all the details or all the content yet, and then we'll just put all that rest of that stuff in later. That almost always causes rework. It might not be something that you can build a client for. So you now have eaten into your ROI when it wasn't necessary. If you just get your content and get your requirements done before you start designing and developing. There are some people who disagree with that. I am a total believer in content first, it works for me. I don't do one stitch of development until I have all the content. Now, by that I don't mean that I don't go set up some plug-ins and I set up the environment. But in terms of actually building anything, because what tends to happen is, especially with content, excuse me, what tends to happen is, you've built the website, you're already, all you're doing is waiting on that content. And the content never comes, and the content never comes. So you say, well, I'll just go ahead and finish it. And then when the content's ready, I'll just plop it in. And then when the content comes, it's not what you expected. The client has changes. When they're pulling the client, when the client is responsible for pulling the content together, that activity itself spurs ideas in their head, and it spurs things they forgot to tell you in the initial query session, right? So that's why it's so important to get that content lined up. And well, it's gonna go off on a tangent, but I won't. Okay, proof that this way of managing change works. Once upon a time I worked for a company called Keen, based in Boston. And they're now NTT data, they ate somebody, somebody ate them, they ate somebody else. And so now they're NTT data. And John Keen wrote a book called The Six Principles of Productivity Management for Software Development. And those six principles changed my life. They changed my personal life, they changed my work life. And this was like a cult. You had to have a copy of this book, you had to go to a two-day seminar, and even senior executives, if they didn't go, got fired for not going. And why? Because this worked. What he did was, he was an old IBMer, and he started a consulting firm in the 80s. And his projects were all running over time and budget. So he did what any good IBMer does, he hired a consultant to come in and study his projects, and they identified six areas where things were going awry. And so he developed these six principles. They're very simple, common sense principles. And I have a little training, free training on my website about the principles. And I'll tell you a little bit more about that in a minute. But it was defined, you can see them on the front of the book there. Define the job in detail, get the right people involved, estimate the time and cost, break the job down, establish a change process, and agree on acceptance criteria. And the break the job down one, he called it the 80 hour rule. We had to have a deliverable, now some of these projects were two years long, okay, but we had to have a deliverable every 80 hours. Not necessarily a deliverable that goes to the client, but a deliverable that way you know within two weeks time. And of course, if your whole project's only four weeks, you would break it down into smaller chunks. But that way you have an incremental process for determining, am I on schedule, am I behind schedule, that sort of thing. So after he started implementing this, they were consistently in the Gartner Magic Quadrant. And if anybody doesn't know what that is, just Google it. In the Magic Quadrant for getting projects done on time and within budget. It was really very sad to me when they were acquired by another company because that whole methodology, that whole book, it was really more of a culture at that place went away and it was actually kind of sad. Okay, so how do you embrace change? The first thing you have to do is educate the client. When we go and we talk to clients, we try to act like we know everything and but we forget what they don't know. They don't know how our business works. Be honest with the client and tell them, look, there's gonna be change later. Cuz you're gonna forget things, I'm gonna forget things. They're gonna be things we think of later that would be a better way of doing things, so educate your client on the bottlenecks and the problems that projects often face. Acknowledge change as inevitable, it is. We tend to take this attitude that if I don't get it all right at the beginning, then it's gotta be a change for later. And we tend to pretend like if you're really good, then there will be no change in your project. That's crazy, because there's always gonna be change. This is my big one, abandon the crystal ball approach. Let's see, I think that'll take me about 10 hours. And this task will take me about two hours. You need to have a repeatable process for estimating your projects. And because if you don't measure, how do you know you're getting any better at it? And the only way to get better at it is to continue to do it, unfortunately. I wish there was a special formula that we could just plug in for everybody and it would give you the proper estimate. But just practicing is the best thing in terms of estimate. But this crystal ball approach, we tend to want our clients to think that we are omniscient and we can see into the future. And we've done this so many times and we're so professional. We know this is the best solution for you. And you really have to do more than guess. Position changes opportunity when a client says, I just looked at my competitor's site and they have this really cool feature and I want that feature on my website. That might be a good time to say, you know what, let's make that a phase two item. Let's get all the stuff we'd already agreed upon done and then we'll go to phase two. So you can always position this opportunity. This is my big one, establish and stick to the change control process without exception. I'm gonna go into these a little bit more in detail in just a minute. Put the client in charge of change. You put the client in charge of change where they manage it all and I'll explain a little bit more in detail about that in a second. They tend to ask for fewer frivolous changes. Like, can we make that red color a little darker? They can kill you with all those little nitpicky things. Okay, so how do you educate the client? First of all, it's not their fault, they don't know. They are in a completely different business. My brother is a realtor and I help him with his website and he has said to me on more than one occasion, Beth, I just wanna sell houses. I don't wanna learn all this stuff about my computer. So it's not their fault, they don't know. We forget what we didn't used to know sometimes, don't you think? You need to discuss the way you're gonna manage change very early in the process. Let them know, this is how we do it. And we do it this way every single time, whether there's a change to the requirements, a change to the cost, or a change to the resources. You need to be brutally honest about change. I already covered that. Just tell them exactly how this typically goes in a project. But you have a process in place to keep these things from happening. So that way, it also becomes a selling point or a unique value proposition because now you're a good project manager. Suggest other options for content activities. This is a big one of mine. I don't know why clients think they can write content just out of the blue, like it's so easy or gather their photographs or any of that. So what I do is I run a rough order of magnitude estimate for the content that I show it to them. And usually they'll look at that and go, whoa, it's a lot more work than I really thought it was. Because until they can see that in visual form, they just don't think it's that big of a job, but it's huge. And this tends to be the biggest bottleneck in all web development projects, WordPress included. Acknowledge change is inevitable, we went over that. Just tell them, it's gonna happen, but I've got a process to keep it from impacting our budget and so on and so forth. Abandoning the crystal ball approach, I went over that. Let me see, was there anything else I want to tell you about that? Oh, don't treat change like a penalty to the client. That's the other thing, I hear people talking all the time. Well, my client, I tell them, I ask this one guy, I said, what's your change control procedure? He said, if it's not in the contract, it's out of scope. Okay, so that means the entire universe is out of scope. That's not a real good way to define what's in and out of scope for your project. But, so stop treating it like a penalty. If you've done all this other stuff, educating the client, explaining that change is inevitable and done all that, then, oh, sorry, then you don't have to treat it like a penalty. Then it's a thing you're working on together to say, to assess it and say, is this something we want to do now? Is it something we want to do later? Or is it something we really don't need to do, because it doesn't really meet any business requirement? Positioning changes opportunity, sometimes I've had as many as four phases on a project that was only supposed to be one. And that's because they came up with new ideas. They decided they wanted to add some things. The other thing that I often do in this case is I use a minimum viable website. If the client is hard-fessed, I'm going to do the content, I'm going to get it all together. But I know, because I've either observed them, or I can tell that they're all overworked, and then nobody has any time to devote to this, then I will say, look, give me the content that you have, let's build a website, a small little website around that, and then the whole rest of the project becomes phase two. And then establishing and sticking to that change procedure. What did I want to tell you about that? OK, I wanted to ask, how many people in here have a written change control procedure that you present to the client? One. So this needs to be part of your contract, because they need to agree to do business with you the way you're going to do business. And this is another thing that I've been coaching some of my clients on is that you need to shop the client just like they're shopping you. If they won't agree to follow your processes, or they show signs that they're not going to follow your processes, then maybe you should move on to a client that will work better with your situation. This is my favorite one. Putting the client in charge of change. OK, how many people, and be honest, how many people pad their estimates to cover change? Right. OK, why is this a bad idea? The pad is bad. That's my new slogan. The pad is bad. And I'll tell you why. You can't measure it. You just put this arbitrary amount of money on top of the quote for the project. Oh, let me back up a minute. I'm going to go off on a little tangent here a minute, and get up on my set box and ask you to please stop calling it a quote. It's not a quote. It's an estimate. An estimate, by definition, will change. You don't estimate just at the beginning of the project, and you're done. You estimate throughout the project. But you have to make it clear to your client. This is an estimate. OK, so back to the change thing. So instead of the pad, we can use a change budget, which accomplishes the same thing, but it allows us to measure it as we go forward. For example, let's say the project is $5,000, and I've decided to add 20% on top of that. Pick whatever percentage you want. You've got to figure out what works best for you. Keen used to use 30%. Sometimes I'll use 20% or 30% of the total that I've come up with, and that is a separate budget in a separate bucket that is only touched to cover change. So let's say two or three weeks go by, and the client says, oh, I forgot to tell you about those five bio pages for our senior executives that we've got to have. That's a change. So we write up the change. We assess what the impact's going to be. We give it to the client. They see what the impact is going to be. They either approve it or decline it. If they approve it, that money comes out of that change budget. Hey, y'all, this is how you always come in under budget, because that's part of the budget. So you always come in under. If you've got enough in your change budget and there's not any ginormous, complete pivots or anything like that, and in that case, you just have a really big change request. So now the client's in charge of, am I going to take that money out of that bucket and spend it or not? And that's what keeps them from requesting so many frivolous changes that aren't really necessary. All right, what are the elements of a good change control process? Needs to have a change budget. Needs to define what change means, because remember, your client doesn't know what you mean when you say change. They think that might just mean change to the requirements, but it could mean change to the team, change to the timeline, because your senior programmer got in an accident, so you're not going to be able to meet the timeline. That's a change request. It might not affect the money, but it's still a change request that you submit a change control form for, because then when you go back and look at all of your project documents, you can see, oh yeah, we got this done late, but it wasn't because of anything that we did wrong. It was just act of God or whatever. So keeping those project documents together in a project notebook is another best practice that I adhere to, because that's how you know you're getting better. That's how you can look back at what you did before and figure out, oh, this is why this went south, because we did it this way. Let's do it a different way next time. It also identifies who can initiate the change request. That's usually anybody on the team. The client can initiate it. One of your team members, you can initiate it. That's usually the way I word it. It must establish that everything is in writing. You don't just do a change, because the client asked you to, it has to be in writing, has to be signed by the client. I know this sounds really structured and strict, doesn't it? But this is the one place, you can be loosey-goosey a lot of places. This is one place, if you want your projects to get finished on time and within budget, this is one place where you do need to be really structured and strict. And you know what, the deal is, if you talk to the client at the very beginning about this stuff, they're usually happy that you're doing this, especially when you say, you know all those other guys, they're not gonna do this and you need to ask them if they padded their quote. Excuse me, estimate. All right. Oh, it identifies who's gonna do the assessment and that's usually either you or somebody else on your team is going to assess the impact to the project, is it gonna affect the budget, the timeline, and so forth. It also uses a change request log. This is the same thing about documentation. If you have a change log for every one of your projects, you can see consistently, we are missing this one thing and that's what, and it's coming up as a change later and later, over and over. It specifies where the change request will be maintained. I usually keep a project notebook. Some of those documents in the project notebook, I end up turning over to the client so that if they go on to do other things and they need all that documentation, they have it. Identifies who's going to approve the change request. That's a no-brainer. It's usually the client. Specifies how long do you give them to either approve or decline the change request because you know, just like every other client, you give it to them and ask for it back in two days and then, so a week later, they get it to you. And then, of course, that needs to specify what happens if they don't respond in the proper timeframe. That's the next thing on there. It clearly states what happens if there's a delay from getting it approved. And it specifies when the payment is due. Now, depending on the client, I do this differently. If I get a sense that the client may not want to pay for it later, I will invoice for it right away. But if I'm going to do that, I make sure that's in my proposal and they understand that if there is a change, that's a separate invoice and a separate payment. Sometimes, especially if it's a client I know well and I've worked with before, I'll just add it into the next regular payment interval. Okay, so now I'm going to give you an example of a good change control process. Now, you can take pictures of these slides or you can go to my website because it's a free download and I'll give you that information in just a few minutes. So, you can see here, change for this project includes any change to what is specified in the approved statement of work and then it specifies what different categories that could fall into. Now, when I say the statement of work, I just want to clarify, I use a two-step proposal process and in the proposal, I don't give a precise estimate, I give a range and then I do the, and I get a deposit that pays me for the statement of work and then I do the deep dive statement of work as part of the project and if at the end of that process, my estimate and there weren't any big changes and it does not exceed the range I gave them, we just keep going. If it does exceed the range, I give the client the option to cancel the contract and they hardly ever do it. I'll tell you why they hardly ever do it but I give them that option because if they choose to go somewhere else, take it to a low cost person to have it done, I don't care, I've been paid for the statement of work, go implement it but you know what happens in today's environment a lot of times is people put so much detail in the proposal, the client never responds to the proposal, then they take that proposal to fiver and get it done for nothing. Not very well but they get it done, right? So this is why I do this in a two step process and then I make sure that if they don't want to do it, if they want to go elsewhere, I've already been paid for the work that I've done. So I just needed to mention that there. Okay, this is where you state who can request the change and that it will be on a change request form. Then the written request is given to the project manager, that might be you, you might have a project manager on your team, whoever you've designated that is gonna receive these things. And then the project manager or their designate analyzes the change request and the impact to the project and updates the change request form with that information. Then the project manager ensures that the change request is logged, tracked and reported. The project manager presents the change request form to the client representative that's responsible for approving the change. The change request must be approved or rejected in writing within X number of days, whichever days works for your project. If the client doesn't respond within the agreed upon timeframe, the change request will be added as an item on the issues log and fall under the issues management process. And that's a whole nother topic, issues management. We don't do, most of us don't do a very good job of documenting and tracking those either. Issues and risks both. The project manager will maintain the change control documents along with the change request log. Absolutely no work associated with the change request will begin until formal approval is received. That's another mistake. Was that the 30 minute mark? Okay. The mistake that we often make is we know it's gonna be approved so we'll just go ahead and do the work and then we'll get the signature later. It's always a mistake just in case the client changes their mind and then you've done all that work for nothing. When the change is approved, the project plan will be adjusted, the amount authorized will be subtracted from the change budget added to the project budget. You may be invoiced immediately for the approved change or we may wait until the next schedule payment interval and then in big red letters, payment is expected upon receipt of the invoice. So let's review what we went over in this little mini lesson. You need to educate your client on change. Acknowledge change as inevitable. Abandon that crystal ball approach and quit trying to guess the future. You need to have a detailed deep dive, not just that two hour discussion before you create the proposal. There's no way you can find out everything in that two hours. Position change as opportunity, phase two. Establish and stick to a good change management process, not if it's not in the contract or status code. Still makes me laugh. Use a change budget and put the client in charge of it. So that is my topic. If you'd like to learn more, I have a tip sheet on six easy ways to control scope creep in your proposal. I've got a little mini course on content collection and using a content first approach. There's the first lesson is free. The other is a paid product, but don't buy it because it needs to be redone. So I'm just saying don't buy it. And then the other one is on those six principles. And what I did was I took those six principles for software development and I modified them to be specifically for WordPress. So my first one, instead of just define the job in detail, my first one is define the job in detail with a content first approach because I think that's the way you need to do it. And then he had get the right people involved. I have get the right resources involved because you also have to get the right plugins involved, the right theme involved, the right hosting company. So it's more than just people. So that's a little mini course. So you can see how I deliver courses online on those six principles. And if you don't want any of that, but you wanna be kept notified of some free webinars, detailed webinars that I'm gonna be having, you can just text roadmaps to 444-999 and that'll put you on my email list. And listen, I hardly ever send emails. So I need to get better about that, but this is mostly just to be kept abreast of some things I'm working on that you might seriously be interested in. The other way to learn more is we do have a private Facebook group called WordPress Project Management. And so people share and engage and ask questions. And so that's a safe place where you can come and ask any kind of question about project management that you want. And I manage that one. The other one is just one I just am in love with this Facebook group. These two guys, it's called the Admin Bar and they focus more on the business side, how to increase your productivity on the business side. They talk about tools, they talk about process, they talk about funnels. Yes, funnels for an agency business as well as an online business. And they're just very laid back and the community's really engaged. So, and I'm hoping to get the project management group a little more engaged as we move forward. So my slides are available on my website at WP RedMats Forward Slash WordCamp. Please go to mytalk.rocks and make lots of comments. Everybody take my picture and put it on there and then tell them how much you just absolutely love my talk. And any social love you can give me, I would greatly appreciate that as well. One thing I am working on is a complete framework with forward press, project management, with work breakdown structure and all of that stuff. So if you wanna be kept abreast of when that's gonna be available, then you need to get on my email list. Thank you for coming to my talk. I finished early. Does anyone have any questions?