Scope Creep
The gradual expansion of a project's work beyond what the contract originally specified, usually through a series of small requests or field decisions that accumulate without ever being formally captured in a [[concept-change-order|change order]], as opposed to a single large addition that obviously requires one.
Why it matters
Scope creep is dangerous specifically because no individual addition looks big enough to fight over, so a contractor absorbs it request by request until the cumulative cost and schedule impact is significant, and by then, proving each small addition was actually outside the original [[concept-scope-of-work|scope of work]] is much harder than it would have been in the moment.
On a real project
An owner's representative makes a series of small verbal requests over several weeks, such as moving an outlet here or adding a shelf there, each one seemingly too minor to bother with a formal change order. Two months later, the contractor tallies the cumulative labor cost of all those small additions and finds it adds up to a meaningful, unpaid expansion of the original scope.
Who this matters most to
A Project Manager has to enforce a discipline of documenting every scope addition in writing, no matter how small, specifically to prevent scope creep from becoming an unrecoverable cost. A Contracts Administrator reviews field logs and correspondence to catch scope creep before it accumulates into a dispute at closeout.
Where this goes wrong
A superintendent agrees to a string of small field changes verbally, trusting that "we'll sort out the paperwork later," and never documents them as they happen. By the time the contractor tries to recover the cost at the end of the project, the owner disputes that the changes were ever agreed to, and without contemporaneous written documentation, the contractor has little leverage to prove the scope actually grew.