In project management, there’s often a desire to overdeliver and impress clients by giving them more than they asked for. While this impulse may come from a good place, it can lead to a phenomenon called gold plating. Let’s take a closer look at what gold plating is, why it’s not as helpful as it sounds, and how to keep your project on track without unnecessary extras.
What Is Gold Plating?
Gold plating happens when a project team adds features or work beyond the agreed-upon scope without getting formal approval from stakeholders. It might seem like a good idea to add those extra flourishes to make your client extra happy, but gold plating can backfire in several ways. It often results in higher costs, delayed timelines, and can even introduce risks by adding complexity that wasn’t anticipated or budgeted for.
In essence, gold plating is about overdelivering in a way that doesn’t necessarily add value. The extra features you add might not be important to the client, and worse, they could end up causing problems later in the project lifecycle.
Examples of Gold Plating
Gold plating can take different forms across various industries. Here are some common examples:
- Software Development: Imagine a developer adds fancy animations to an application that weren’t requested. While it might look nice, it could lead to performance issues and doesn’t align with the client’s original needs.
- Construction Projects: Suppose a contractor decides to upgrade a building’s flooring to a high-end material without consulting the client. What if the client was happy with the original flooring choice and now has to cover additional expenses?
- Marketing Campaigns: A marketing team might create an extra social media campaign to “surprise” the client, thinking it will make the project more successful. However, the client might not have budgeted for the extra resources needed to support the campaign.
These examples show that gold plating, while seemingly well-intentioned, can lead to frustration, wasted time, and unplanned costs for both the project team and the client.
Why Is Gold Plating Bad?
Gold plating isn’t about delivering exceptional quality—it’s about delivering unrequested quality. This can negatively affect a project by:
- Increasing Costs: Additional features require additional resources, which means extra labor, materials, or time. This can throw your budget off balance.
- Delaying Deadlines: Every extra feature takes time. The more time your team spends working on things that weren’t in the plan, the greater the risk of missing the project’s deadline.
- Introducing Risks: Adding features outside the original scope can introduce new problems. Features that weren’t initially planned can be less thoroughly tested, resulting in bugs or issues down the line.
- Misalignment with Stakeholder Needs: Ultimately, your client knows what they want. Delivering unapproved extras may mean you’re spending resources on things that they do not need or value.
How to Avoid Gold Plating
Avoiding gold plating is all about sticking to the plan and maintaining clear communication with stakeholders. Here’s how you can prevent it from happening:
- Stick to the Scope: Clearly define the project scope during the planning phase and make sure every team member understands what’s included—and what’s not.
- Communicate Regularly: Keep in regular contact with stakeholders and verify that what you’re working on aligns with their current needs and expectations.
- Use Change Management Processes: If there’s a request for a change or addition, put it through a formal change management process. This way, you can evaluate whether it’s necessary, and stakeholders can decide if it’s worth the cost.
- Train Your Team: Make sure your team understands why gold plating is harmful. Everyone should be on the same page that meeting requirements with high quality is better than adding unplanned features.
- Focus on Deliverables: Keep your focus on delivering the agreed-upon requirements to the best possible quality rather than adding more bells and whistles.
Gold Plating vs. Scope Creep
It’s easy to confuse gold plating with another common project management challenge: scope creep. Both involve deviations from the original plan, but they’re quite different in nature.
The key difference is the source of the change: scope creep is driven by external requests from stakeholders, while gold plating comes from the team’s decision to go beyond what was agreed upon. Both issues can lead to project inefficiencies and delays, but understanding their distinctions can help in addressing and preventing them effectively.
Scope creep occurs when a project’s scope gradually expands due to unplanned changes. This is often driven by stakeholders continuously adding new requirements that weren’t originally considered. These changes are usually incremental but can add up over time, leading to larger and more complex project work without the appropriate adjustment of resources, timelines, or budget.
Gold plating, in contrast, is initiated internally by the project team. It’s about adding features or enhancements that weren’t requested or approved by the stakeholders. This is often done with the belief that it will add value, but it’s not aligned with the customer’s actual needs or expectations.
Final Thoughts
Gold plating often stems from a well-meaning desire to go above and beyond, but in project management, it’s important to recognize when extra efforts become detrimental. Delivering what the client asked for—with excellent quality—is more valuable than adding unnecessary bells and whistles.
By understanding gold plating and how to avoid it, you can keep your projects on track, meet deadlines, and deliver the value that stakeholders are truly looking for.
