Scoping Problems

Another rats' nest of a topic ..

Banks are horrible at scoping their needs, so why don't they wake up and do something about it ? Too easy a question to ask, I guess. Part of it is management's incompetence, some of it is crap BAs, indecisive business users, the list goes on.

This week though was another good example where we spent 6 weeks working on an RFQ to define a scope of work (in general terms of course), and then get our approach and shop in order. We spent a lot of time on the governance and risk mgt side of things ensuring we got the client dependencies & responsibilities outlined (first cut until we actually start the project, of course). One of those dependencies was getting the main set of use cases done and any other requirements before we could do our thing. Literally, on the first day of the project our project lead tells me "the guy doing the use cases is working on something else next week, so won't be done until then". First friggin' day. Then next day "we [the client] have some delays, we want your team to help out on another project..." Time to bolt down the doors and stick to our plan, I say.

I know this is a common thing in scope creep, etc, but these guys are just simply awful at it. My whole thing in doing this blog is because of the need for risk mgt everywhere and this is one of the prime culprits. Any waterfall based methodology is simply flawed (as many would atest to), but it is our duty as consultants to bring them around to a new way of thinking in terms of either sticking to a plan (meaning both some upward management and introducing them to an agile plan that can adapt to changes in not only scope but timing of tasks), or saying "NO", or "games a bogey, let's be a staff supplementation company" .. first two sound good to me..