Requirements creep

The gradual expansion of a project's functional or technical requirements over time, typically driven by evolving stakeholder needs rather than a single deliberate scope change — closely related to scope creep and feature creep.

Example

A software project's initial requirements document specifies three user roles; by the time development starts, stakeholder discussions have expanded that to five roles with distinct permission sets, without any formal requirements-change process.

Why it matters for agencies

Requirements creep often happens before a project even starts building, during the requirements-gathering phase itself — which makes it easy to miss, since it doesn't look like a mid-project change request so much as the requirements document itself never quite settling.