> Now you've given every PM and sales guy carte blanche to throw whatever flavor-of-the-moment idea comes in their head.
YES! My current project has this issue. There is no deadline for my project beyond "urgent" (but so is everything else) and as a result, any request from a client gets approved. Client wants a button shifted slightly to the right? Approved. Comms wants the semi-colons gone? Approved.
For a supposedly urgent project, we are making no real progress week after week on functionality simply because urgent has no tangible meaning.
That's not solved by adding a date. That's solved by blocking feature requests. I'm in a project with the same problem, BTW. It's incredibly demoralizing.
Change Request == MONEY, and all prior deadlines extended. How much depends on the complexity required to perform the change... and figuring that out is a billable item too (please submit change requests in bulk to save).
YES! My current project has this issue. There is no deadline for my project beyond "urgent" (but so is everything else) and as a result, any request from a client gets approved. Client wants a button shifted slightly to the right? Approved. Comms wants the semi-colons gone? Approved.
For a supposedly urgent project, we are making no real progress week after week on functionality simply because urgent has no tangible meaning.