A good illustration of a brutal confrontation of theory with practice is a situation I experienced and will never forget. It was a project for a very big company. The contract was carefully crafted. The work was carried out according to the PMI methodology. The problem was that from the very beginning, the client insisted on getting many more features than were included in the project’s scope. The project team took meticulous notes of all the potential scope creep. At the same time, the client was adamant about demanding the extra features yet unwilling to formally order the work, let alone pay for them. Moreover, the client insisted that the features be delivered according to a changed schedule. They wanted to add several intermediate stages of delivery that would require some additional testing, releasing, and acceptance phases. All this significantly delayed the delivery timeline, which the client blamed on the vendor.