The Law of Expanding Ambitions

Boyle’s Law of Project Management more or less states that if scope is allowed to change freely, its rate of change will exceed the rate of progress. Like many observational “laws”, it sounds like something purely out of Wikipedia until you’ve lived it, as you watch a project slowly drown under the weight of its ever-expanding ambitions.

The tension at the heart of this law lies between scope and progress.

Scope is what you’ve promised to do.
Progress is how much of it you’ve actually done.

They should live in harmony: scope defining the destination, progress marking the journey. But in practice, they drift apart.

Scope is a boundary, a box, a contract with reality. It defines what’s in and, crucially, what’s not. The problem: it’s somewhat abstract. It lives in the heads of those in charge, and it’s kept at bay only if those in charge give a damn to do so, which is rarely the case.
Progress, on the other hand, is measurable: bricks laid, lines of code written. It is real, finite, and usually slow and demoralizing.

The problem begins when scope expands more freely than progress moves forward. Like any inflationary cycle, it erodes the value of what’s already been done. The finish line moves faster than the runner. The project begins to feel like it’s no longer anchored to reality. This dynamic instills the idea that the project is always under construction, never complete, constantly evolving.

Projects don’t fail because people don’t want to work; they fail because the destination has been constantly moved, again and again, until the only thing that’s actually moving is the scope itself.

As Albert Einstein correctly put it years ago:

“Two things are infinite: a project’s scope and human stupidity; and I'm totally sure about them both.”