Project scoping: what to get right first

Every audit we run turns up some version of this. If you only fix one thing about project scoping this quarter, make it the first item below.

Clear scope protects the client at least as much as it protects the agency. If it only works because one person remembers to do something, it does not work yet.

Start here

Vague scope is the root of most budget disputes. This is the sort of thing that compounds, quietly, in both directions. The practical test is whether someone new to the project could tell, in a minute, that it had been handled.

Then this

Write down what is explicitly out of scope. Where this goes wrong is almost never a lack of knowledge. Check it against what you would want a competitor's site to get wrong.

Eventually

Assumptions should be recorded, not held in someone's head. There is a version of this that is over-engineered, and it is worth avoiding. Doing this properly once is usually cheaper than doing it approximately three times.

In practice

The projects that go badly are rarely the ones with the hardest technical problems. Three things worth confirming about project scoping before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• Vague scope is the root of most budget disputes — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

Worth checking on your own setup before it becomes someone else's problem to fix.