Scope: Are We Done Yet?

A sales executive on his way to a meeting stops by your office and asks you for a list of accounts in his territory, stressing that the accounts must be grouped by industry. You easily create the report and hand it to the executive. "Where are the opportunities? I need to see revenue by industry," he says.

You create a new report. When you show it to the executive, he says, “This is OK, but I really need these numbers broken down by sales reps.” It takes a few more exchanges like this to give the executive the report he wants.

Sound familiar?

This story shows the importance of scope when discovering business needs. The sales executive led with his need for the report to group accounts by industry because that was most important to him at the time. He assumed that you would know to include opportunities. When you gave him the opportunities report, you assumed that was all that he wanted. You both lacked scope to define exactly what he needed from the report.

A better approach would start by asking the sales executive what he wanted from the report, even if he does not have time to spell it out completely. Putting scope around the report specifies what it should and should not show.

Scope acts like a container of customer needs. When the container is full, it has all of the needs to complete the solution.

Scope focuses your effort to get the most out of the time, energy and attention you devote to a solution. It specifies completion of a solution stage, so you know when you're done. When you discover customer needs, other requests can emerge that are out of scope. For example, the sales executive in the story asks you for a dashboard to go with the report. He doesn't want to wait for the dashboard to get the data from the report. That puts the dashboard out of scope and into the next version of this solution. After the sales executive accepts the report, you would ask what he expects from the dashboard and put those needs into the next version scope.

How have you managed scope, even on a small scale, like the story above? How did you or someone else determine that you had all of the client's needs to complete a solution? What did you learn from the experience?

Please share your experiences in the comments below. We also welcome your questions, suggestions, and challenges in the comments.