What do you do if you have a concern about scope creep? Scope creep is dangerous. It’s the concept that you started out investigating this thing, and as the investigation has gone, the scope of the investigation has crept outwards. It can be an issue for a lot of reasons and in no small part because often you have sold your investigations at a certain price or given a certain budget or estimate and scope creep is going to negatively affects the way your invoice relates to that estimate you gave. But also, you need to conclude your investigations.
There are a lot of legal reasons you need to conclude your investigations aside from your own project management of your organization. So you need to worry about scope creep before you even start your research. You need to have scoped and defined your investigation before you even started. And so really the answer to what do I do about scope creep is define the scope at the very beginning of the investigation so that if you start to have created, you can go back and say: We were just investigating this one tiny issue and now we’re investigating an entire department of problems, and I need to revert back to the individual issue. You can offer to, of course, document things that you’ve learned along the way that are outside the scope of your investigation. But as investigators, we really need to be pretty guarded about scope creep.
