Controlling Scope Creep at Scale

Short summary

A 67-county government program reduced scope creep by 95% through three governance moves: requiring items to answer four questions before entering the backlog, establishing structured single-channel intake with stakeholder agreement, and making trade-offs visible by asking what gets deprioritized for new work. Scope creep is a governance failure—fix it before the program starts.

• •Four-question rule eliminates weak requests before they enter the backlog
• •Single-channel structured intake forces stakeholder agreement and categorization
• •Trade-off visibility shifts the question from 'can we add this?' to 'what do we deprioritize?'

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