When the brief quietly changes

Sarah said "tight scope, four weeks max" in April. In May she's asking to add analytics. You walk into the next call already aligned.

The problem

Half of project trouble is somebody quietly changing what they want, and you not noticing until you're already over budget or over time. The budget was £20k in March; six weeks later they're talking about £50k. The scope was "landing page only"; now they want analytics. The deadline was Q3; now they mention Q4.

It almost never happens in one big announcement. It drifts. By the time you spot the gap between what they said three months ago and what they're saying now, you've already done a chunk of work assuming the old version. And nobody is the bad guy here — people change their minds. The problem is that you didn't have a chance to.

What changes

Every time someone states a concrete fact — a budget, a scope boundary, a timeline, a decision criterion — the CRM records it as a stated position with the original quote and the date.

The next time they state a contradicting fact on the same topic, the morning surface shows you both quotes side by side:

New Signals
  • Sarah Lim — drift detected on stated scope
    Apr 6:  "tight scope, four weeks max"
    May 9:  "could we add analytics?"

You see the drift before the call. You walk in already knowing what to ask: "When we spoke in April you mentioned wanting to keep this tight at four weeks — has that changed?"

The conversation that follows is straightforward. The hard part — noticing — has already happened.

Why we built it this way

The CRM never silently picks a winner between the old and new position. Drift is information first, action second. The new value might be a genuine change of mind, a misunderstanding, a misextraction on the CRM's part, or you mishearing five weeks ago. You're the only one qualified to interpret it.

The system's job is to make the change visible before you next speak. Once you've decided which version is correct, the CRM stops mentioning it. The historical version stays in the record forever — both for audit and because "what did they say in April?" is sometimes exactly the question you want to answer.

What to read next

→ Projects come and go; the relationship stays — how the CRM separates "the work" from "the person," so closing a project doesn't archive a client.