Managing Up
When the brief changes after you have started
Requirements move for ordinary reasons, and the damage comes almost entirely from the change going unrecorded rather than from the change itself.
By Devika Menon3 min read
Changing the brief is not usually a failure
Work gets defined before anybody knows very much, and then people learn things. A customer says something unexpected, a constraint turns out to be softer or harder than assumed, or somebody senior sees the first version and realises what they actually wanted. Those are all legitimate reasons for a brief to move, and a workplace where briefs never moved would be one where nobody was paying attention.
What causes the trouble is not the change but the fact that it usually arrives casually. A sentence in a corridor or a line at the end of a message quietly replaces a week of assumptions, and because it was said lightly, everyone continues to believe the original timeline still holds. The work has changed size and nobody has noticed except the person doing it.
The cost is invisible to the person asking
Somebody requesting a change is usually thinking about the difference in the finished thing, which may indeed be small. They are not thinking about the work already done that now has to be undone, the decisions taken downstream on the old assumption, or the fact that you told two other people something that is no longer true.
That is not carelessness so much as distance. They cannot see the interior of the work and have no way of estimating it. Which means the only person who can put a number on the change is you, and if you do not, the default assumption — that it costs roughly nothing — stands unchallenged until the deadline arrives and it obviously did not.
Repeat it back with the consequence attached
The move is short and it should happen within a day of the change, not at the end. Confirm what you now understand the work to be, and say plainly what that does to the timing or to the other things you were doing. Not as a protest. As a checkable statement of fact that the other person is free to correct.
Something like: as I understand it we are now doing this instead of that, which puts the finish date about a week out, or means the other piece slips. That sentence does three jobs at once. It catches misunderstandings while they are cheap, it makes the trade visible to the person who is allowed to choose, and it leaves a record that nobody has to remember.
Send it in writing even when the conversation was verbal, and keep it brief enough to be read. The purpose is not to build a case against anybody; it is that memory of who agreed to what degrades fast, and the version that survives is usually the one that was written down.
Distinguish a change of mind from a change of information
Some changes come from new facts and are simply the job. Others come from a decision that was never really made in the first place, where the brief was vague because the underlying disagreement had not been resolved and you are now discovering it one revision at a time.
The tell is whether the change points in a consistent direction. New information moves the work towards something more specific. An unresolved argument moves it back and forth, and you will find yourself reinstating something you removed a fortnight ago. If that happens twice, the useful intervention is not another revision but a request that the people who disagree settle it, which is a reasonable thing to ask and an uncomfortable thing to ask.
Where the churn is structural
A few environments change direction constantly, either because leadership is unsettled or because the organisation is genuinely reacting to something outside its control. In that setting, working in large finished pieces is a losing strategy, and the people who cope work in smaller units, confirm more often and hold their plans loosely.
It is worth being honest that this is tiring and that the tiredness is not a personal weakness. Repeatedly discarding work you have done well is demoralising in a way that a heavy workload is not. If it is the permanent condition of the job rather than a bad quarter, that is a legitimate thing to weigh when deciding whether to stay, and it is a more concrete reason than most.
Common questions
Will asking for confirmation in writing look obstructive?
It rarely does when it is short, prompt and neutral in tone. A two-sentence summary reads as diligence; the version that reads badly is the long one, sent late, that itemises everything you have had to redo and leaves the recipient looking for the accusation in it.
What if my manager insists the change is small?
They may be right about the finished result and wrong about the effort, so the useful response is specific rather than argumentative. Naming what has to be redone and what it displaces gives them the information to decide, and it is their decision to make once they have it.
Should I stop working when the brief becomes unclear?
Usually not entirely, but it is worth stopping the parts that would be wasted if the ambiguity resolves the wrong way. Saying which pieces you are holding, and why, is more useful than either pressing on regardless or waiting for a clarity that may take a fortnight to arrive.
Staff writer, After the First Job
Devika writes the explanatory pieces on first months, managing up, money at work and reads the small print so you do not have to.
