Here’s an example of a five-step process for scoping projects that will avoid boondoggles and donnybrooks.
Scoping a digital transformation program is never easy because the number of attractive opportunities available to engineers almost always exceeds the available budget and staff capacity. Sometimes, ambitious blue sky projects are approved because their vision is so appealing. That never ends well and wastes significant resources. Every project should be scoped to advance some aspect of the business strategy.
Here’s a five-step process for scoping projects that will avoid boondoggles and deliver value for engineers and their organizations.
Prioritize opportunities
Before engineers can start work on any digital transformation project, they need to understand which opportunities offer the highest return and lowest risk. Use these questions to rank proposed projects:
- Does the scope of the proposed projects address significant pain points and opportunities? This question differentiates urgent needs from wants.
- Are there senior executives prepared to be the project sponsors and champions of the projects? Proposals without a project sponsor should be rejected due to likely failure.
- How appealing are the business cases for the proposed projects? Low-return proposals should receive a low priority.
- How does the scope of the proposed projects align with the business strategy? Poor alignments indicate lower-priority proposals.
- Are any of the proposed projects prerequisites to other projects? Sometimes, foundational projects, often with little or no business case, must be completed before other higher-benefit projects can start.
- How risky is the scope of the proposed projects? Projects requiring extensive data cleanup, emerging technologies or significant specialty skills should be deferred.
- How enormous is the scope of the proposed projects? Projects that are too small don’t advance digital transformation much. Projects requiring massive budgets or organizational resources should be split up or rejected.
- Will the scope of any of the proposed projects take more than one year to complete? Longer projects consume significant staff resources and are at higher risk of not finishing. These should be broken up or deferred.
Answering these questions leads to a ranked list of digital transformation projects and rejected proposals. Projects with the highest return and lowest risk will be near the top. Engineering managers can then approve as many projects as budget and staff constraints allow.
Understand the business context
Before engineers can scope an approved digital transformation project, they need to understand the business context and the drivers for change. Start by answering these questions and documenting the answers in the project charter:
- Who are the key stakeholders, such as internal departments, customers, and vendors involved or affected by the project?
- What are the needs, expectations, and preferences of the key stakeholders?
- How will the project scope impact the business processes, culture, and organization structure?
- What external forces, such as competition, technological advances or political change, are driving the project scope?
If you can’t answer some of these questions, you must conduct more analysis or conclude that the opportunity is not as appealing as initially thought.
Write the project charter
The project charter is a document that summarizes the project goal, supporting objectives, deliverables, scope, business case, organization, budget, assumptions, constraints, and risks. It serves as a basis for planning, executing, monitoring, and controlling the project. Writing this document requires the collaboration of the project sponsor, team members and stakeholders to reach a consensus on every element. Consensus-building helps avoid misunderstandings, disputes, or rework later during the digital transformation project.
If the collaborating groups can’t reach a consensus on the project characteristics, such as scope, one or more of the following issues are occurring:
- Lack of agreement on scope and priorities.
- Wishful thinking about what the allocated resources can achieve.
- Personality or power conflicts.
- A fantasy business case.
- A focus on technology potential rather than business value.
- An attempt to tackle more scope than the organization can absorb.
The organization may be unprepared for the opportunity if the project manager and project sponsor can’t facilitate the needed consensus. It’s best to stop before the project starts and consumes significant resources for no business beefit.
Build support for the project scope
Once the project charter has been accepted, it’s time to build support for the digital transformation project scope among a wider audience of senior management, stakeholders, and employees. Helpful techniques used to review and validate the project scope include:
- Scope feedback – a continuous process of collecting and analyzing feedback from customers, end-users, or other stakeholders on the project deliverables or outcomes).
- Scope validation – an informal process of testing, inspecting, or evaluating the project goal, objectives, scope description and deliverable list to confirm they meet the scope and high-level requirements.
- Scope verification – a more formal process of obtaining acceptance and sign-off of the project charter and its scope description.
If the project manager and project sponsor encounter significant challenges or hesitancy while building support, the project charter may need to be revised. If stakeholders challenge the business case or the scope description, the opportunity is not as appealing as initially thought. Then, it’s best to stop before the project starts.
Manage scope changes
Once a project is underway, scope change proposals are unavoidable as the understanding of project details grows. Because digital transformation projects involve exploration, uncertainty, and innovation, the frequency of scope change proposals will be higher than for other project types.
When stakeholders see that you’re managing a project effectively, they want more scope. However, you won’t be a hero if you deliver more scope later than the original project completion date. Engineers can respond to this push for more scope as follows:
- Asking stakeholders to fund a change order only to analyze the impact of their proposed scope changes. If they don’t support that, you’ve dodged a bullet.
- If your team produces an analysis report of the impact of their scope changes, recommend that the work be deferred to the likely follow-on project.
- If your stakeholders want the change now, ask them what other scope they want to remove from the project to maintain the budget and schedule. Since the stakeholders want everything in the current scope, the new idea is dropped.
Once the project team recognizes that you’re not approving any proposed scope changes, they will question why the proposals are being documented and sometimes analyzed. The value of the documentation is that the unapproved scope changes provide an excellent starting point for scoping a follow-on project.
When engineers manage digital transformation projects by including only the scope described in the project charter and avoid adding appealing new scope, they will deliver successful projects.
