Scope creep can often be a problem faced in the medical device industry. How much noise it creates can differ however depending on who is being affected by the drift. In one of my experiences, part of my team was involved in discontinuing product codes from being available to be purchased by customers since they were obsolete products. Requestors would come to us with a list of product codes that needed to be discontinued and the team would work on that process which was one that was fairly extensive and time consuming. Many times, because of the time it would take, would then come back to the team with more codes that needed to be discontinued, tacking it on (scope drift) to the original ones. This would cause immense delays in fulfilling requests as the list just kept on growing and growing (or in some worse cases, codes were discontinued and then requestors came and said not to discontinue). The delays became such a nuisance that our team decided to strictly deal with the initial scope of the request, and that any additions to the scope would need to be a new, separate request that would be dealt with after.

So in context of this example, one of the most effective ways to prevent scope drift is to be firm on working on the initial scope of the project.