Deal with scope issues immediately

Every job a client hires you or your company to complete should have some scope of work tied to it. If this is a regular part of your business practice (as it should be) - great work. Now that you've got that down, here comes the challenge - make sure to manage that scope with your customer.

The biggest part of this challenge is raising up the red flag the minute the project crosses the line from being within scope of what they're paying for, to outside of that scope. My first tendency is to put it off - maybe we'll just do this one more thing and that'll be it; just one small step outside of scope. But once this starts, its like an avalanche - it will get out of control really quick.

I dealt with this just yesterday. I knew a project I was managing at work was on the line of scope and was about to cross over. Sure enough, I got on the phone with the client, and here it came - they were asking us to do something that was outside of the original scope of work. I raised up the red flag right then and talked them through what was included in scope and how this request was outside of that. We talked about it for a while (these usually aren't quick conversations) but came up with a good solution. I told him that bottom line, I wanted us to be focused on doing great work for them, rather than worrying about trying to do the work as quickly as possible because it was outside of what we originally quoted. He got it, agreed that they wanted to pay us for our time and work, and we're quoting out this new aspect of the project. Problem avoided - we'll get paid for our time and the customer will get a better product because of it.

So bring up these issues with your clients immediately. If you wait, you'll let the issue slide too long and it'll be a much harder conversation (or you'll just avoid it altogether). Don't hesitate - business is all about relationships and this is just part of the dance.