I believe you’ve covered the essence of scope creep, admirably. Program Managers spend so much of their energy getting a program organized and getting cross functional buy-in to a plan that will deliver on customer expectations, that it can be frustrating when the team encounters “friendly fire” from customers or managers that have the best of intentions (usually) when they introduce incremental project scope.

Be that as it may, I have never worked on a project for which the scope did not constantly change throughout execution. The fact is that it’s unreasonable to expect that everybody can predict every minute feature that they want at project inception, if it has any amount of complexity at all.

So, your message is perfect. Identify scope creep as soon as it exists. Define it for impact to cost, timing and/or quality. Get customer and management buy-in to the impact. Track the execution of the newly defined program.

Well done.