Scoping: The Art of Ongoing Relationship Building & Alignment

0:00I want to talk about scoping, which is an important process to be doing from the beginning of when you first start talking to a client all the way through the end of a project. Let's look at this in a little more detail. What is scoping? Scoping is essentially an ongoing process of alignment with you, the consultant, and the client, and making sure that you're aligned around a problem that the client actually wants to be solved, and that you're stating and understanding in a way that the client agrees with. A good way of doing this is just practicing with somebody who might have a problem that you don't understand and see if you can ask them a series of questions and then restate it typically in writing and show it back to them. If they say, "I, you're not really understanding me," this is a failure of scoping. You didn't ask the right questions, you didn't go deep enough, or you just don't understand what they're really trying to communicate. So the goals when you're doing this are really three things. One is you want to figure out what the real problem is.

1:08The problem that you're presented with at the beginning is rarely the problem, right? Moral is going down. It's usually not that, right? It might be that actually the profits going down and we're paying people less and there's nothing we can really do around that, right? So you want to scope things in a way that it's actually specific to what's really happening and something you can take action on. The second thing you want to figure out in scoping is what is out of scope. This is really important in any project. What are we not working on? And it's very useful to explicitly name this, right? So if you're working on increasing morale, you might explicitly say, "Okay, we are not going to touch benefits," right? We're not going to look into that. We're not going to explore that. We're also not looking into getting rid of any team members, right? So you might put these things to the side of the beginning and that way you know, "Okay, if the project starts going in that direction, that's when you wave your red flag and say, "We agreed not to explore this. I'm not going down this path."

2:14Finally, another outcome of scoping is that you figure out who the players are. The drama inside the company, the landmines, you might step on, the issues you might discover. You want to be asking who are the players involved? What's at stake? Are you going to get promoted if you solve this problem? Who are the people that are going to look good if we do well on this? Who are the people that might get blamed if things go wrong? You want to really have the real dynamics and understand what's at stake. A lot of times when you're working with a client at a company, they have a lot at stake in terms of their own career. They might have a promotion on the line. They might have gotten a bad performance review and given this project to try and save things or turn things around. You need to know these things to give you added context in the project. You want to force people to think and as a consultant, you want to show value in the sense that your presence and participation in a dialogue with them shows them that, "Oh, this is somebody that can help me think deeper. Ask the questions. I need to be asking and be aware of some of my client spots." We can look at this visually. You're going through a process of what the client thinks is their problem. This is rarely what the actual problem is.

3:33Your job of the consultant is to reframe this, rescope this, and agree on a problem that you set out to solve. This is often something that overlaps with the client's understanding, but also includes things that they did not expect. Throughout the process, you also find that the actual problem you end up solving is both outside of what you initially thought and what the client thought from the beginning. This is where you end up in this green box. Why do we scope? One is that it makes your job easier. If you have a clear understanding of what you're going to be working on, it's way easier to move forward than if you have an ambiguous problem that the client is scoped way too large.

4:20Hey, help me improve morale. Pass. That is not a project I want to have. It's way too broad. They're not defining success. They're not identifying an actual problem. Two, a benefit of scoping is that it eliminates busy work. A big problem in consulting is scope creep. And scope creep is when the client starts sending you all sorts of requests that are not aligned with what you've agreed on. There's two reasons this happens. One is you've never actually agreed on a very specific and narrow thing that you're working on. And two, you're not pushing back. You don't have something that you've agreed on. And you're not pushing back and saying, Hey, we didn't actually agree on doing this.

5:02Now in any client engagement, some scope creep is inevitable. And you need to balance. This is really art of figuring out, okay, how much extra do I want to do just for the sake of the relationship versus what is actually not going to help us at all. And knowing when to push back is really important. Three is that you're going to build a relationship with the client through scoping. By pushing back, reframing, showing that you understand, you're building trust. And the more you build trust and show that you're actually committed to solving the problem and following a rigorous process, you're going to strengthen that relationship. It's typical to do most of your scoping at the beginning of the project. This is when you're framing the problem and we'll have another lecture exploring, how do you define and scope the problem and come up with a problem statement. But more important, too, is to continue scoping throughout the project. In every check-in, I do throughout a project. I'm often starting with, this is the problem statement we agreed on. Does this still make sense? What's changed? Am I getting the wording wrong? Should we change anything? Do we need to update anything, revisit anything? That way you're getting continual buy-in throughout the project.

6:20Also, you're making sure that nothing changed at the company, right? And did a new initiative get announced? Did people get fired? Did people get promoted? Did people's responsibilities get reallocated? All these things are really important throughout the process to make sure that you're still working on the same problem that you started with at the beginning. So some example questions for you to think about. There's basically infinite questions you can be asking. You want to be leaning towards open-ended questions, asking questions around the meta process. How did you arrive at this understanding? How did you think about approaching this project? What are the issues behind this?

7:03What's driving this? Why is probably one of the most useful and powerful questions? Just keep asking why, right? The five-wide method of saying, "Why did that happen?" Okay, well, why did that happen? Okay, why did that happen? And keep digging. It can feel a little crazy at first as the consultant, but you want to keep asking questions, right? Your role is kind of a therapist where you're trying to go deeper and deeper and help the client as well come to a better understanding of what's really driving what's going on. So there are two key moments you always want to be doing scoping, sharing drafts of documents. This is often a very savvy move to get the client to help you avoid any unnecessary work. Share something that's 80% complete and get their feedback. Say, "Hey, I'm working on this. I know we're going to be presenting this to the broader team or checking in more fully in a more formal way. Do you want to just take a look at this and make sure nothing's off?"

8:05What you're really trying to do here is make sure that you're not spinning your wheels on something for many hours that the client actually doesn't want or doesn't agree with in terms of direction. The second thing is check-in calls. For these, I always prepare a document and I always restate our problem statement timeline, agreed on outputs and deliverables and check-in and say, "Hey, here's where we are in the process. Also, let's take a step back and if you could just take a second and read the problem statement, does this still resonate? Are we still working on the same problem did anything change?" So the real goal in this is to make sure that you and the client are aligned the entire time. You want to make sure that throughout the process you're working on what the client actually wants to be working on and that will help them both in their career and probably any selfish motives they have to look good in their organization but also the broader organization and how you as a consultant can be seen as somebody that helps create value in a number of different ways.