This Luminaries episode delves into the intricacies of project scope management, particularly focusing on the critical inquiries that must be made to ensure effective engagement and clarity in project deliverables. The speakers introduce five pivotal questions that serve as a framework for defining and managing project scope, which are essential for leaders navigating the complexities of client relationships and team dynamics. They emphasize the importance of understanding the underlying causes of scope issues, which frequently stem from either client-driven expectations or consultant-induced complexities. This episode aims to provide listeners with not only theoretical insights but also practical strategies for maintaining scope integrity, thereby enhancing the overall effectiveness and efficiency of project management.

Takeaways:

• The podcast emphasizes the significance of asking five critical questions to effectively define and manage project scope.
• Understanding the sources of scope problems can help leaders avoid common pitfalls and enhance project outcomes.
• Utilizing a mindset focused on inquiry allows consultants to gain deeper insights into client needs and enhance engagement.
• The discussion highlights the importance of manager behavior in mitigating scope issues and fostering effective project management.

Remember you can reach out to Ian and Mike to ask a question or share your thoughts - email them at consultingforhumans@p31-consulting.com

You can follow the show on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/groups/13116342/

And you can follow us on Instagram at https://www.instagram.com/learn.consulting

The Consulting For Humans podcast is brought to you by P31 Consulting LLC

Foreign welcome to the Luminaries.

We're really glad that you're with us.

And maybe you're remembering right now that in our regular show we talked about One Minute Scope, taking our inspiration from Ken Blanchard's famous book, the One Minute Manager in Luminaries.

Today we're going to continue the conversation and try to get ourselves ready to dig for the information that we need to really do a great job of One Minute Scoping.

Mike, where's that conversation going to take us today?

Well, we're going to talk about five critical questions for defining or managing engagement or project scope.

Some primary sources of scope problems.

Where do these issues arise from?

And a little bit about leader slash team mindset and behaviors.

So, Mike, this episode seems to me it's going to really help anybody who's leading a team or responsible for a relationship with a client where scope questions are going to arise and maybe needs that little bit deeper insight to help them go beyond the kind of knee jerk.

Yes and no responses to scope changes, right?

Absolutely.

Well, Mike, in that case, tell us about your experience.

Where have you gone to reach for those critical questions about managing Scope?

Well, to be perfectly honest, early in my career, early in my days managing a project, I probably would have turned to Rudyard Kipling's the name of this poem I kept six honest serving men already says that I've now got a Scope problem.

I've gone from five to six here.

But I used to say over in my head, you know, I kept six honest serving men.

They taught me all I knew.

Their names are what and why and when and how and where and who.

I send them over land and sea, I send them east and west.

But after they have worked for me, I give them all a rest.

So it was the project, the client, the team, and these six little things that as I was sitting there thinking, I just had a conversation with a client or I'm trying to write an initial thing and I would kind of count off of my fingers.

Have I covered off on all these?

So very, very early, very rudimentary.

And then I would pull down my stone tablet and start to, you know, chisel away my answer so I could send it via post on the pterodactyl.

Because of it, you know.

Right, right.

By the way, let's acknowledge that Kipling gives us a gender equity problem by talking about serving men rather than serving anybody else.

Yes, but of his time.

It's a good point about the power of inquiry or inquiry.

And you can say however you like.

These questions end up Being like a Swiss army knife, there's sort of a question for every situation, a question for getting stones out of horses hooves.

There's lots of benefit here, I think, for us in being ready to ask questions to dig behind the scope for consulting project.

Well, how about you, Ian?

Any thoughts on five critical questions that would supplement the one minute scope we talked about in the main episode?

Well, you've got Kipling's poetry, I've got David Meester's books.

And David Meester wrote about a really nice framework, not so much for questions, but for conversations.

If you want to dig into it, go searching online for David Critical Conversations.

He's writing about it from the perspective of building a relationship and developing new business, or as you might say, sales.

But some of the questions in his framework are really useful and I keep coming back to them.

The question of why now?

Like what's happened lately that makes this work urgent or important?

Why you?

Which I guess is a close cousin to the who question in Kipling's poem.

What impact is this having for the client personally?

Who even is the client?

Meister also talks about reframing, so asking what if questions.

For example, what if we didn't do anything about this problem?

What bad consequences would ensue?

And another hypothetical, if you like, what next?

Imagine the future.

What would a good outcome look like?

And this is what Mesdair calls partly framing and partly envisioning.

Getting the client to sort of wave their hands in the air and imagine a better future.

And getting them to think about the future, getting people to imagine what the future looks like, is quite a powerful motivational technique, right?

It really is.

It really is.

There are some people that need the burning platform.

There are other people who need that rubber band pulling them into the future.

And the what if and what next really cover off on both of those.

Right, so Maester got me deeply into why there's probably a lot more what though.

So do you want to take us into a master list here, give us a deeper dive that might help us to make a more exhaustive list?

Where would we start?

Yeah, we've talked to some of our consulting colleagues.

We've reminisced, kind of going back over the years and pulled together some critical questions that would help things like what specific business outcomes are we trying to achieve now?

This is, you know, kind of the, the royal WEU client working together with us.

And there's always a question about it's you, I, we, and how will we measure success?

But really trying to get to the heart of what's the project's purpose, what's the business context, what's the impact, what are the benefits?

So reaching at some things that we really Talked about in scope 2, I.

Think it forces us as well to look for what I often call the smell of money.

Yes.

Often come asking for us for activity.

We need to make sure that we understand what it means for them or even for their boss or their boss's boss.

And I like this question.

If they give a vague answer or if we give ourselves a vague answer, that's a signal to me that we're going to have scope issues.

A really precise answer to this what's the outcome?

Question gives what you might call guardrails for scope integrity.

Okay, I'm imagining a bowling lane for ten pin bowling right now.

Knowing what the outcome is gives me those little pop up rails either side.

That means even if I bolt a little bit off track, I'm going to be in the right place.

I'm not going to go into the gutter.

Nice.

Very nicely done.

Good.

Ian, what's next?

I would be thinking about decision making.

Because if clients are asking for advice, if they're turning to consultants at all, they normally have to make a decision.

Either a decision about what to prioritize or a decision about how to proceed, or a decision about whether to continue with the thing that they're already engaged upon.

So I will be asking what specific decisions will be made based on our work, by whom and when?

Another reason that I really like this question, Mike, is it sometimes forces us to elevate the conversation.

We've talked before about stakeholders understanding who the economic buyer is, who the key stakeholders are.

If the person that I'm talking to right now can't answer the question about who's going to make the decision that we're, that we're informing here, that tells me that I've got a little worry, a little uncertainty about scope.

So knowing who the stakeholders are because of knowing the decisions that are about to be made is a really powerful signal that we know about scope.

That also gets us into some other things as well.

If we know something about the decision making that they have in mind, that tells us something about the timeline constraints, about the organizational context, organizational barriers.

It also tells us something about the level of precision or confidence that we need.

Because we may think that they need to know the market size down to the second decimal place, but actually all they need to know is it bigger or smaller than the market for this other thing over here.

So knowing about decision making Gives us a frame for thinking about completeness and precision and confidence.

Nice, Nice.

And I think we've talked in the past about when consultants fail to understand what decision their work's going to inform, that's often the trigger for the worst and most damaging scope misunderstandings.

I mean, this is where we get those projects that refuse to die.

And those are the ones that we really only had the haziest idea about utility.

It was just about activity.

Excellent.

Understanding what the decisions are that are coming up.

What are the contingent decisions, that's really, really important.

There are probably some other things that we can do to pin down scope as well.

Mike, what would be another what question that we could ask ourselves?

Well, I think asking something like, what are the boundaries of our investigation?

Depending on what you're doing, Something like, you know, what systems or processes or departments or geographies or products, should we explicitly exclude what's not in?

Right.

And this gets me into the territory of what I call hard scope.

So we're going to do an analysis.

Does our analysis include these countries or not?

Is Canada and Mexico in or just the United States?

Are we including Southeast Asia?

All of it.

Or are we just talking about Japan, product families?

Are we talking just about these kind of widgets, or are we talking about your whole portfolio and your whole product line?

Are we talking about just the next four years, or are we talking about the long term?

And I often wave my hands when I'm talking about this because this is what I like to call the hard scope.

I think clients are buying three things.

When they're paying for our work, they're buying benefits, and we've talked about that.

They're buying deliverables and they're buying hard scope.

And if they want to add another product or another group of customers or another territory, that means that we're adding to the hard scope.

And understanding what that is and what that isn't right at the outset is really useful.

Some clients are great at telling us this.

Some clients can end up with it a little bit loosey goosey.

So it's great for us to ask this question.

And, you know, when you're paid for time and activities, having it a little loosey goosey, maybe not so bad.

But when you've quoted them a price for the work, some clients would just as soon have it a little loosey goosey, because that's on you.

You know, these are hard decisions.

We don't want to make them.

And if we got a fixed price with you, we just love for you to Wallow in that for a while and keep saying, yeah, what else you got?

What else you got?

Yeah, I think great question, Ian.

There's another what question on my mind here, Mike.

Now that we've talked about decisions, now that we've talked about business outcomes, it's interesting to dig a little bit deeper and ask about history, ask about the past.

So a really great question that I like to ask is what similar initiatives have been attempted before, what worked and what didn't work, and why.

Asking about the historical perspective has taught me a lot.

Sometimes it was a hard question to ask right at the very beginning of the conversation, but really understanding where they've been before and how they're feeling about how that all turned out can be super revealing and give me a lot more insight into what scope is really like.

You know, it's interesting because this, I also agree, this is one that, that I think is really important to know.

But you just mentioned a little bit of a hesitancy to ask it and I always, I thought, wow, do I relate to that.

I always had a little bit of a hesitancy to ask it, even though I knew how important it is.

What do you think drives that?

Well, maybe it's a little bit of pride in our intellectual purity.

Like we're not going to trouble ourselves to ask about what happened before because we're 100% confident that our new and awesome insight approach is going to be exactly what they need.

Maybe we don't want to trigger that embarrassing awkwardness that comes when you ask people to get real about what's just happened.

Because the chances are if they're asking for our help, there's probably a mistake or a misapprehension or a wrong decision somewhere in their recent past.

I think like we say, there's a bit of hesitancy there.

It can be hard to get Ed's straight answer very, very early in the relationship with the client.

But once there's a little bit of trust, I found it's a question that really pays off for us.

And in fact I'll flip it around.

I'll say sometimes some of the big blow ups and scope disagreements I've had on projects have been explained by a recent piece of history that I hadn't known about, that I hadn't taken account of, but that absolutely loomed large in the clients minds.

If only they had had the opportunity to tell us about it.

Yeah, I couldn't agree with you more, Ian.

I mean, all of a sudden there's all this work that they've done that they have insights into that would be really good to know.

But we didn't ask, so we didn't know.

Or there's politics going on or certain stakeholders or issues or something.

There's all that I know.

For me, I knew that there was a real gold mine in that question.

And sometimes I thought, yeah, but if I ask that and it sounds a little similar to what we're proposing or it just gets me back in the old situation of oh yeah, you've hired me to tell you the time and so I ask you to hand me your watch and then I read it back to you.

But that was just that feeling of me.

But this really is one that has a high payoff.

And to your point, trust is important to get to good answers and to have a situation where like many things, if we can explain to somebody why we're asking that question.

Yeah.

We're more likely to get a good answer.

Yeah.

What's in it for them?

Yeah.

So Mike, we are four questions in now and we promised ourselves five critical questions.

So we're saving up for a bit of a big whammy for the end here.

I think I know what's coming here.

I think it's going to be a big what if.

But tell us what kind of a what if it might be here.

Well, I love this.

Yeah.

This idea and you know, we've applied it in so many different things, but what if we had to deliver something valuable in half the time with half the resources?

What should we focus on and what should we eliminate?

Right.

It's a good one.

Again, interesting, Mike.

We started off with quite simple, non threatening questions about context, about business outcome.

And we've got deeper and darker into the client's real situation and you might even say their psychology.

This is asking, do you really know what it is that you're asking for?

If you were able to encompass something that you could do with only half the time and only half the resources, what you're actually doing is saying, let us all get real about what we think the outcome could be.

Let us all show that we know something about what it would take to implement the kind of solution that we're talking about.

I've heard these kind of questions sometimes result in embarrassed silence because the client's don't want to think about it.

I've heard it sometimes result in overconfident statements from consultants like what do you mean half the time, half the resources?

We have no choice.

We're obviously on track to build a big ABC thing.

Whatever it is.

And obviously there's no choice but to do that, so get out of our way.

And I think that is a sign of a bit of a closed mind or even the sign of a consultant that, that that has a horse in the race, if you know what I'm saying.

Right.

And I think it's.

You mentioned this before in a simpler situation.

It's just a hallmark of creativity.

It's when think about when something in real life happened, how this constraint that all of a sudden appears, we get incredibly creative and we do deliver pretty much of the value in half the time or, you know, so again it's prioritizing, but it can also be not just helping limit the scope on the client side.

It can be helping us to learn, wait a minute, from what we know, from what we've done, if we really wanted to get creative about this, what could we deliver?

Doesn't mean we have to change our, you know, it's not activities based pricing necessarily.

We could perhaps deliver the value and not have all the effort that we typically use and just roll the methodology the same way as always here.

But a few more things.

What else might pop out of this, Ian?

Mike, it's a really good question.

Obviously thinking about resource constraints forces you to think about priority.

It stops us from over engineering things from gold plating, as people would sometimes say.

People sometimes talk these days of using IT jargon to summarize everything.

They talk about an mvp, a minimal viable product.

This is another way to get to the same basic idea, which is what's the irreducible core of what it is that we have to do.

So imagining that we have less resources is a great way to get us there.

It might also give us another dimension for thinking about scope.

Like if we know that they know they said they want X and we've talked about what would happen if it was only half of X.

That also gives us a language for talking about what would be two or three times X and therefore what would count as a really big step out in terms of scope.

So it's a good way of naturalizing some language between us and the client about what they want and what range of constraints and risks they're expecting.

Well, Ian, I can't help but notice that a lot of the talk that we've had in the original episode, a lot of the focus of these questions, very client focused, which is great.

That's who we're doing the work for.

But there are probably some other sources of scope and scope issues and problems we should mention.

I Think that's absolutely right, Mike.

So, Mike, we said that we were going to talk about the sources of scope creep.

We've got our great five critical questions for understanding scope, but we need to think as well about the reasons why SCOPE might get out of control in the first place.

And I think also there's some bias here for some of us in the world of consulting.

So talk us through it here.

What are some of the key things that drive scope creep?

Well, clearly we mentioned a lot of this is always clients and it's sort of part of human nature.

Things go well, we did a great job.

Things go bad.

Look at all those other things outside of us that happened that caused this.

And scope is a problem.

Well, I think it's our natural inclination to turn to clients and a lot of that we can turn around.

And we have turned around to say, well, we haven't managed that well.

We haven't asked these right questions.

So we're on that a lot.

But sometimes it seems to be more of a do it to ourselves proposition.

We touched on that a little bit.

Oh yeah.

Besides client driven scope creep, we've also got professional or consultant driven scope creep.

Mike, we do it to ourselves.

We talked about this in the main episode, right?

We get over excited doing our favorite kind of analysis.

Consultants start playing with the toys, as we sometimes say, especially with consultants who are maybe less familiar with the client, less familiar with the domain, maybe less experienced in life, maybe less exposed to the incentive to be efficient with their time.

For some reason, it's really easy for professional LED scope creep to run away.

I've seen many juniors do it when they're not well led.

I've seen some surprisingly senior experienced people do it as well.

When the red mist of excitement kind of comes across their eyes that they're going to do their favorite favorite thing.

It's still a dangerous moment.

And I think understanding and noticing professional LED scope creep is a really important skill for leaders and project managers.

Yeah, I always think back to Pogo, which is probably a Boomer reference, but we've met the enemy and it is us, right?

If you want to know how to take care of professional ed scope creep, go back and listen to the main episode again.

Get your 1 minute scope review with your team every week.

Review it every time you get to a milestone, every time you come up to a deliverable, that's what is there to help you with.

Absolutely.

And then Mike, besides clients and besides ourselves, what else goes on that might cause us to have a scope issue.

To contend with, well, it's easy to call this everything else or anything else, but, you know, we might just narrow it as circumstance driven.

There are things outside of the client, things outside of ourselves.

They're just things that happen and they can be all over.

I mean, we can think about external changes, regulatory shifts, competitor actions, market changes, anything, anything outside.

So a lot of that is going to be specific to what we're doing and how we're doing it.

But those are the kinds of things that I think oftentimes if we were taking kind of a risk management approach, like we would to a lot of projects, to a consulting project, you know, perhaps some of those would come up ahead of time.

What, what are those things?

Not client, not us, who were so absolutely focused on that.

What could possibly go wrong?

Well, we probably have a lot of things that we know from experience that could possibly go wrong.

And I've heard you say this before, Mike, volatility and big changes in the world doesn't have to be a bad thing for us.

In fact, very often it's a good thing for us.

The biggest recent memory event that led to circumstance led scope creep, of course, was the COVID pandemic.

Well, maybe there have been bigger ones, depending on where you are.

Now, you could probably say the same as well for professional LED and client LED scope creep.

So that's an interesting thought to dwell on.

How many times have we pushed back or said no a little too soon to things that have come along that might actually have been an opportunity for us if we had the savvy and the smarts to parlay it into a new piece of work and a new piece of value we can add to clients.

So maybe we should just add in here a note of caution that scope creep by itself is not a problem.

Scope creep is a problem if you end up doing stuff that the client doesn't value and therefore won't pay for.

But understanding it often is a great source of opportunities to deliver new stuff for the client.

Yeah, and you said, you know, if you deliver stuff that the client doesn't value or doesn't want to pay for.

And I think a corollary is also us missing the opportunity to provide more valuable stuff.

Yeah, but we said, no, it's not in the contract, and we had a chance to actually provide more value to the client and to ourselves, that these actually were opportunities, not threats.

How many times?

How many Times.

Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.

So, Mike, I love this list of questions.

This list mostly of why and what if questions.

I love the three different kinds of scope creep for us to be alert to as leaders.

Mike, I think that as we evolve in our consulting career, as we get to learn, as we get to learn our clients and the industry areas and the domains that we're working in, the questions will change.

But it's really important for us to be alert to what's happening that could impact our scope non client factors.

It's good for us to be able to recognize and preempt and mitigate these sources of scope creep and also, as we were just saying a moment ago, to exploit them.

Why they represent good opportunities for us and for our clients.

Right?

Yeah, absolutely.

So it seems like we could be coming to a moment here where we could wrap up.

What do you say?

Yeah, I think so.

Ian.

Ian, we discussed in our main episode that manager behavior and mindset can be a huge part of dealing with scope problems at the beginning and throughout the project.

As we talk about consultant led scope problems that I couldn't help but bring into mind, you know, just this idea of manager behavior and mindset.

I remember being staffed on a big, complex, high visibility, year long global project.

And Janice, I think I've mentioned Janice before, the wizard of questions.

Janice was actually running this project and it had all kinds of potential scope issues.

But the thing that I remember most about that meeting, because it was one of my early days with Janice, is that she had people that were kind of on loan from around the world to this project.

And she asked us all pretty early in this meeting.

She explained, here's this project and here's what we're going to do.

And this all of the things I mentioned a minute ago.

Then she said, but the first thing I'd like you to do is I'd like you to create a list for me.

I'd like you to write down your professional commitments over the next year.

Some of you were on loan.

What are the things that are going to pull you away from this project?

I'm supposed to have all your time, but what's going to happen?

And then I'd like you to write down all your personal commitments.

You know, vacation, you're going to your kids, soccer game, oh, sorry, football game, anything that you've got coming up and hand those in.

And I said, this is my early days with Janice.

And I turned to the colleague next to me and I said, so I guess we can just throw those in the trash.

Now, that's not what happened.

The list got up, Janice gathered it up, and she said, okay, so here's what I'd like to do with these two lists.

Number one, we're going to figure out how to run this project so that you can meet these personal commitments, because this is intense and it's going to require a lot from you.

Number two, I'm going to go through your professional commitments, and then I'd like to sit down with you and where it makes sense with your boss to see if we can renegotiate some of these if they're going to be a big impediment to this project.

And I'll tell you what, we walked out of that project kickoff not only with a lot of other things, but the one I remember, most people that would have crawled down the mouth of an alligator if Janice needed help on a project.

It just, it was a great thing about managing and mindset and a person who was absolutely committed to giving the client what they really wanted, valued, needed.

She would manage that pretty astutely as well, as well as her team, where it made sense and addressing it up front, not as it, oh, surprise, surprise.

Developed nine months later.

Right, Mike?

It's a really great story to round off this discussion of scope, right?

Scope at the personal level of the professional and how to kind of get the team working for each other and working for a common idea of scope rather than potentially against each other.

I love the story of Janice, and I think it's a really, really great example.

So this is a good moment to say thank you to all the folks who've taught either you or me or both of us something about scope in our lives and all the thinking that's gone into this episode.

If you're listening to this and you've liked some of these questions, especially the big five that we came up with there.

If you'd like a copy of that in a document, maybe to inspire your next Scope exploration, you can get one for free by emailing us at consultingforhumansp31-consulting.com and just asking us, and we'll be happy to send it to you.

We'd love to hear more what's worked for you, your teams, your clients, maybe some stories about how Scope has bitten you, and more importantly, what you learned and are doing differently to minimize the chances of that happening in the future.

You heard our email address.

All our other contact details are in the show notes.

And as we said at the end of the main episode, if there's something else in consulting you'd like us to give the one minute treatment to.

Please let us know what that would be.

Absolutely.

We'd love to hear from you.

Thanks for joining us and we're looking forward to your company.

Next time on the Luminaries.