Scope Creep Examples — Web development
A request to debug a third-party system the agency doesn't own
The client asks the dev team to troubleshoot a separate, unrelated internal tool built by a different vendor while the actual build is in progress.
The SOW scopes a customer-facing web application. Partway through, the client mentions their separate internal inventory tool — built years ago by a different vendor, on a different stack — has started throwing errors, and asks if the current team can "take a quick look since you're already in our systems." It's a codebase the team has never seen, built by people who are no longer involved, and entirely unrelated to what's being built.
Clause typically implicated
Clause typically implicated
Deliverables clause→ — The SOW's deliverables list is specific to the current application — an unrelated system built by a different vendor isn't part of it, however adjacent it feels.
Suggested change-order wording
Suggested change-order wording (illustrative, not legal advice)
The inventory tool is outside the scope of our current SOW, and since it's a codebase we've never worked in, diagnosing it properly would take real time to get oriented before we could even confirm the cause. If it's urgent, I'd recommend reaching back out to the original vendor, or we can scope a short discovery engagement to assess it separately — happy to send an estimate for that if useful.
How this usually resolves
Being upfront that unfamiliarity with the codebase means real diagnosis time (not a five-minute favor) usually redirects the client back to the original vendor, or into a properly scoped discovery engagement — either is better than an informal "quick look" that turns into hours of unbilled debugging in unfamiliar code.
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