Specimen · catalogued monster

The Scope Creep Leech

Small favours, endlessly, on a shoestring budget

A cheerful, bottomless guest who arrives with a modest purse and the tastes of royalty, sipping free advice like cordial. It lingers politely at every doorway of the project, forever asking for just one more thing.

Symptoms

• Change requests arriving after the sign-off meeting
• Budget unchanged while the wish list keeps growing
• Delivery team quietly working unpaid evenings
• Quick favours that quietly become whole workstreams
• Original scope document now unrecognisable even to its authors

Overheard in the corridor

• “It's only a tiny tweak, surely it won't take long”
• “Could you just pop that in while you're there?”
• “We thought that was already included, to be fair”
• “Can we get a quick opinion on this, informally?”