Mitigating Scope Creep with Review Chains

When I worked in the advertising industry, one of the biggest challenges we faced was scope creep. Without fail, we would all be sitting in the project post-mortem meeting, wondering where it all went south.

And some agencies didn't bother with the post-mortem at all, but rather focused their sights on the road ahead, without learning from their mistakes. 

There are a lot of reasons that things went sideways with scope creep, and we were delivering one thing when our client consistently asked for another. Maybe it was that we didn't understand the scope of the project to begin with, we were pushing our own creative agenda, or maybe we weren't being agile in our approach.

Part of the solution is ensuring that we were tracking our efforts in the right project management solution (ahem, WorkBook), but the other part is making sure that the client is actively involved in the process, not to mention key stakeholders.

Case in point: at most of the agencies I worked at, my desk wasn't far from the creative whiteboard. This is a space where the creative team would come together to collaborate on their ideas. That works when you're all sharing the same office, but what if you're not?

Without fail, these creative whiteboard conversations would carry into all hours of the evening, requiring that support staff, account teams, and others would need to stay late to execute on the selected creative ideas. To top it off, client feedback was limited to meetings, or even worse, email. By that time you've already invested a significant amount of time, and you're already off the back when it comes to over-delivering.

Review Chains solve for these inefficiencies by enabling teams to set up reviews in advance of when they need them to start, making sure that you’ve got the right people involved, in a timely fashion. This removes blockers and ensures 100% collaboration.

A great example of this is setting up a Review Chain that includes multiple steps within your creative process. This could include concept development, legal, account management, production, and consistent client reviews and checkpoints. This allows you to iterate on the creative as you go, with predefined dates and times. And naturally, you can also create Review Chains when using ConceptShare for Jira.

Beyond the ability to set up Review Chains in advance, we've also made user experience changes to what is now called the Review Builder, and in the Reviews view. These changes include the ability to easily see what is (and isn't) part of a Review Chain, create Review Chains on the fly with color-coded statuses, get a birds-eye view into reviews and review chains using the new Review Info and Review Chain panel, pull in preceding review assets and participants, and more.