What works so much better than ‘scope and requirements’

Photo by Taylor Heery

We don’t work from scope and requirements, I just can’t get myself to agree to it. It would be an easier way to 'win' business, but it’s a worse way to deliver value. It shouldn’t be your primary mode of delivering on technology, either.

Instead we work from people. People and process and communication. You get a thousand times farther doing it that way than you would if you signed your name to a scope and a list of requirements.

“Working from people” probably sounds sort of abstract, right? So let me try to make it more specific, since it’s what platform managers do in our system. 

Platform managers get their priorities from constant communication with the full range of stakeholders they are supporting on the platform. It means setting up regular meetings with those stakeholders. It means making a point to understand their goals and their daily work. It means figuring out what’s getting in their way and how your tool or platform can help. It means being opportunistic to find a way to at least start solving their issues. 

Often the solution you come up with might even be something that no one knew enough to even ask for, but that you can see is going to help address the issue most effectively.

You start somewhere, you help train or support or make a change or improvement that moves things for the person you’re helping. Then you communicate back about it, have more conversation, and do it again. And again and again. Always. 

That’s the job of a platform manager. Intake, synthesis, prioritization, delivery, communication. That’s what good technology leadership and stewardship looks like.

Without it, you’re going to keep farming out projects with defined scopes and lists of requirements that somehow keep ending in disappointment or failure. Whereas with the right kind of skilled platform management in place, you’re going to look back and be stunned at how much ground you covered. 

Working this way, when you reflect on the previous 6 months or year, you’ll realize that no one in their right minds would have signed their name to an initial scope covering the amount of territory that you actually ended up covering. It would have been way too much, in way too many areas, to commit to. Much of it wouldn’t have even been on anyone’s radar originally, since it emerged organically as the work progressed.

But you do get there – to an extensive, far-reaching, and strategic scope. You get there when you work from people. Ever better, improvement by improvement, pivot by pivot every day. That’s the gap that has to be closed.

That’s the gap we fill when we step in, and that’s the gap we want to help you to learn to fill yourself in the future. That’s the way to get where you’re really trying to go.