is our scoping was successful?

A new project is in the pipeline and we are ready to kick off this new challenge, Our team is ready and full of energy and enthusiasm. Scoping sessions are scheduled this week. The first session started with a short description of the project, making the focus on the business and strategic impact and how will help the company to accelerate its digital transformation in the perspective of developing new digital products and cloud-based offerings. It’s time to finish the workshop with one conclusion all team members share the same frustration regarding where we want to go. During the week these sessions succeeded one after the other and still having a blur vision, confusing features, and also an organization that we believe is not convenient to drive the boat to the shore.

Exploring the real value

As a product owner, I have to gather the maximum information about the customer business, their strategic goals, and where they want to land once the project takes off. I remember this quote from Dassault Systemes Dassault Systemes !

If we ask the right questions, we can change the world

Asking pertinent questions is crucial to understand the business and the desired value we expect to provide. For a successful scoping workshop, this job should be prepared before and these reflections and analysis at least started in order to keep the team members away from any frustration or defeatism.

Why The role of the Product Owner is very important at this stage?

The product owner is the guard of the vision and customer value, keeping the train on track requires a lot of effort regarding the business understanding and mapping this knowledge to user stories that designers, developers are easily able to take in charge and implement.

Based on our experience, our product owner iterated regularly over the backlog to refine the items and get rid of the irrelevant ones, each time he was approached to revise a business rule.

Specifications and requirements

What kind of format our documents should follow to write down the specifications and requirements and how many details we should draft? this question is indispensable to answer before starting, the more we give attention to what to write the more implementation will be easily taking into consideration all constraints and customer-specific requirements such as solution’s time responding, availability, number of future users. These notes help considerably when it comes to architecture design and technical stack decisions.

Deliverable frequency and type

While in agile project continuous delivery is at the heart of it and shouldn’t be part of discussions but the frequency of delivery and type of deliverable could be, The reason why a team should agree and state early these points.

The adoption of continuous improvement is totally appreciated while the business is evolving but we have to pay attention before investing in this area causes often lead to delivery postponed even contract issues.

Cost

Sometimes and due to technical choices such as licences, do not forget to include them in your budget estimation and let stakeholders know about them, When it comes to money transparency is the key to spread trust and avoid undesirable surprises. the rules are:

• calculate an accurate budget and make sure all elements are included.
• define a process that helps to keep the budget flexible regarding features without over budgeting.

Communication

Whatever the project scope or size, communication is a key to a successful customer value and team satisfaction, Defining communication channels, rules, and tools between stakeholders and project team can considerably impact project progression and target achieving. Communication also implies some values such as transparency about the team’s capabilities what we can and we cannot do, these kinds of statements should be communicated as soon as possibl to help the customer make the best decision.

In my point of view, I prefer to avoid the usage of multiple communication tools and formats with our stakeholders (telephone, email, video-conference, meetings…), this can help keep our exchanges simple, effective.

Regarding internal communication between team members, Personally, I have a lot of appreciation for meetings or face-to-face discussion believing that is the quick and right way to argue a decision or explain a point of view to convince my team-mates of any technical choice. Otherwise using a project management tool to track and monitor is still very useful in order to keep everyone updated and everything documented.

Flexibility and adaptation

Agile practices come to solves today’s project issues and pains, but at any stage, we should be wedged, In my opinion, we have to cope with challenges, involve the team in every decision, think differently and act like one. Scoping is the stage where we invite all involved people to the same boat with one goal is to reach the destination.