The Client Who Always Has One More Thing

When you pack a bag for a trip you always tell yourself this is everything, and then you stand there and remember one more thing, and one more after that, until the bag won't zip and you're annoyed at yourself instead of the trip.

I used to have a client who did that with every project. We'd close it out clean, invoice sent, and then a week later there'd be one more ask — small on its own, always framed as "while we're at it." For a long time I read that as testing me. Like they were finding out how far the scope would stretch before I said no. I'd feel a flash of it every time the email came in, and once or twice I said something short about it that I wish I'd said differently.

What changed it was going back and checking the ask against the actual scope document instead of against my mood. Almost every time, it wasn't in some gray area I was being pushed on. It was a thing the document never mentioned at all, because I hadn't thought to put it there. The client wasn't finding the edge of an agreement. I hadn't drawn one.

Goldratt's constraint idea is the plainest way I've found to say what I was doing wrong. You don't fix a system by getting angry at wherever it breaks — you look at what's actually limiting it and work there. I'd been doing a rougher version of that for years without a name for it, on jet engines, where the job card either had a line for something or it didn't, and if it didn't, somebody was going to be arguing about it at 2am. Same problem, lower stakes room.

I still don't always catch it in the moment. I've gotten better at going to the scope before I go to my irritation, but better isn't solved — I caught myself doing the old version three weeks ago with a client I like a lot, and it took me most of a day to notice I was mad at the wrong thing.

If a client asks for the same "one more thing" on every single project, is that still my scoping, or is that just who they are?