When you are using Scrum, it is sometimes easy to stare yourself blind at stories and task cards, I have certainly done it on occasion in the past. Even worse, if you have already prioritized the backlog some time ago, it is easy to just accept stories into the sprint without too much question during sprint planning.

When doing this, it is quite easy that you loose track of what is important, what you really should achieve in your current sprint, or in the opposite case, your backlog for the sprint will not even closely resemble what you are actually doing and the perception of what you are doing from the point of outside stakeholders might suffer.

The moral of all this? Don’t ever, ever just accept a story into a sprint, always have your endgame in mind, what you want to achieve during the duration of your sprint and what is important to deliver at the end of it. If you don’t do this, you are at risk of suffering scope creep. It might not be the sort of explicit scope creep where a completely new feature is added unnecessarily, but it will definitely be the sort of scope creep where you will spend your time doing things that might not be necessary to do – the best solution to any problem is still the simplest possible thing that could work, but no simpler.

Explicit or implicit scope creep are both the same thing although the latter is harder to catch – once you have committed to it and started doing it, you are sinking time that will be permanently and irretrievably lost, as there will only ever be one 8th of June 2009 and you will definitely be one day older tomorrow, just as you will be one day closer to stakeholders expecting end results.

Always focus on the endgame, ask yourself “how does this contribute to where we want to be at the end of this sprint and in X sprints time?”, and if the answer is “it doesn’t really contribute to anything” or “it doesn’t really contribute to anything right now”, bin or defer the story.
The best sort of scope management is the scope management that is done by everyone involved, continually every hour of every day.