How do you limit the scope of an evolving project?
Hugh Mackay
7 replies
I have a project which is healthily evolving as I develop it. Iām concerned because I can already foresee that the scope of the project, as it continues to evolve, will eventually outgrow my capabilities and time resource.
Is compromise an inevitable part of this evolutionary process? Should I think about building a team rather than limiting the project?
Let me know your thoughts š
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Stephen@smcn
Perfection is achieved, not when there is no more to add, but when there is no more to take away.
--- Some French guy
It depends on what your product is, what your goals for the product are, and what your users would want. Anything else is superfluous. And I get the appeal of more features = better. Self restraint and a clear idea of what you're building are, to me, the best approach to building something you can consider "done". Or at least "done" enough to ship.
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Building a team is the way to go. But you would need to make sure you are onboarding teammates with proper skillsets. Otherwise, you will end up wasting hours with nothing productive.
Usually I write everything down in a list and then list out the must-have's for the MVP. Then just ignore the rest!
Scope creep and project evolution is nothing new. Happens all the time. And good projects keep adding features and functionality throughout their lifetime. One way to handle this is to identify what agile calls as minimum viable product - what is the minimum you can ship that customers will find useful and will be willing to pay for. Build in increments, each increment adding more value to the customer. This way, you would hopefully have a paying project that pays for you to employ skills you don't have. Hope this helps
If you are limited in your capabilities and time resources to integrate these new features, compromising is the only way to go but not as most people would think about it.
I am not sure how you could gather a team if your capabilities are already on the low. On the other side, if you can afford it, I would suggest not to, and here is why.
Depending on the size and complexity of the project, the amount of time and energy to spend on recruiting, coaching your team to be on the same page, and understanding your vision and standard, you can expect the process to be at least 3 to 6 months. Personally, it took me a year while being low on capabilities to sustain the workload since I was working with contractors.
And in the end, that's not even guaranteed! You will have to always check on a daily basis about the ongoing process, get to have a meeting or a call, and provide more data until everyone is on the same page. This process is extremely taxing.
You will end up spending more time on people, instead of your project, which can result in getting yourself a bit lost in the process and losing momentum on building it properly.
I was way more efficient when I was focusing solely on my project than when I was dividing my time into 4-5 completely different tasks.
I don't think you want to limit your project, we all want to have the most functional project, yet, we are limited in our capabilities.
To me, the best way was to keep the evolutionary process until I felt truly satisfied with the whole concept. That's not an easy task, since I tend to get some ideas out of nowhere hustling all my priorities, but at some point, you should be able to reach a "stable" point.
Rather than going straight to MVP and costing you $$$, I would go for a UI/UX designer and make a "realistic" presentation of your project.
We never truly know if our project will fit the demand. I think making a short presentation of a few selected parts of your project to get feedback on what people would want from it is wiser.
Then, the needed iterations could be made without having the sunk cost of all the previous efforts you would have taken, to build the MVP in the first place.
I hope it helps! Cheers
Not the worst problem to have. On the positive side, you can have better access/exposure to talent that will help keep your project moving forward.
Thanks everyone! Really great to hear from you and get your thoughts