Your project's scope changes unexpectedly. How do you manage client expectations effectively?

Begin by thoroughly assessing the impact of the scope change on the project's timeline, budget, resources, and overall deliverables. Understanding these implications will provide a clear picture of what adjustments are needed and how they will affect the project.

Your customer is your long-term partner. Same as your suppliers. The supplier-engineer-customer is a chain in which every link is critical to the success of the project. As such, the sooner your customer knows about any change / setback, the better.

Realizing the fact that, scope changes are inevitable in any project, will make us our mind clear to reach the client as early as possible. While reaching out to the client, put all the facts on the table and its impact on delivery and how it exceeds boundary limits. Having said that, assure the client, despite of these changes in place, project is in control and you are working towards integrating these changes and mitigating any potential delays or issues.

Prior to offering a solution to the end customer (be it an internal or external one), asses the problem(s) carefully, understand the odds of possible success, and come up with multiple solutions. Rate the solutions by your calculated understanding of the situation and mark solutions as: Risky (cheap, fast, first aid kind of solution) Probable (a "good enough" option) Best option (might require extra time / cost) Let the customer decide. This way, the customer is involved and becomes a partner.

Explore all possible avenues to adapt to these changes efficiently and reach out to the client with a goal to ensure that the project's objectives are met, even with these modifications in place. Emphasize your commitment to finding solutions and keep inform the client about the progress in addressing the changes.

Once you reach out to the client and had informed about the change and solutions, chalk out a detailed plan adopting to the new scope and cascade your plan to the entire project team and bring them to the common objective towards the project.

Identify any new risks introduced by the scope change and discuss them with the client. Develop mitigation strategies to address these risks, ensuring that both you and the client are prepared for potential challenges.

Maintaining flexibility throughout SDLC is often underestimated and complex to manage, specifically within the scope creep or a product pivot. This is the on spot time for any engineering manager to use their leadership skills and guidance, as well as encouragement to keep the spirits high across the development team. One of the advices from my engineering management career is to reassure the engineering team that whatever happens next will be efficiently handled by the management and the engineers themselves will not be blamed or negatively impacted under the circumstances. Keeping an open line of communications with the stakeholders is also crucial and can be achieved by establishing a feedback and communications framework.

Before running into this challenge, go into a project with full transparency, take the time to understand customer's (internal and external) needs, using the SOW tool. Dig as deep as possible, doing it at this stage may save lots of efforts and pains later. A good SOW will force all relevant stakeholders to think about all relevant aspects of the project and detect possible "rabbit holes".

8. Review experts deployment Once scope changes , you may have to look folders of experts and discuss with them to look in deployment.