Needs + Resources + Location + Schedule + Budget = Scope

Schedule: When?

The second biggest question on your client’s mind is: When is everything going to get done? While it can be incredibly difficult to predict what obstacles you’re going to face before you’ve even started a project, you need to have realistic goals for how much time each phase of the project will require and when you can complete them. Realistic is the key word here. Don’t promise you’ll meet a ridiculous deadline, then drive yourself and your team crazy to meet it. Your work will invariably suffer, your attitude will be pitiful, and the overall project morale will plummet. That can be a very difficult thing to recover from, so don’t even go there.

Be honest, ahead of time, about how much time you will need to conduct each activity and produce each deliverable. Do yourself a favor and add some cushion time for good measure. Don’t neglect to schedule thinking time, learning time, breathing time, and changing-your-mind time. All are necessary components of your success. There is no need to rush, even when the client says so.

What is the desired end date of the project? Do you need to start work immediately to make that date, or can and should the project begin at a later date? How much back-and-forth between your team and the decision makers on the client’s end will the project require? How many rounds of review are you baking into the process? What flexibility do you need for additional reviews of a particular deliverable, if a conflict arises? What holidays do you need to keep in mind? Do you need to accommodate anyone’s vacation time?

If there is a drop-dead date the client must meet for external reasons—for example, a scheduled event or advertisement your work will support—now is the time to reduce the scope of work. Take on only what you are absolutely positive you can achieve in the amount of time available. On the other hand, if a deadline is looser or, more commonly, arbitrary, weigh the pros and cons of reducing a project’s scope versus extending its deadline. More often than not, when you present a client with this choice, the client will relent on the timeline, in an effort to get the work done to its fullest extent—and get it right the first time.

You won’t be able to predict a detailed schedule of events for a multi-month project before it has even started, but you should provide your client with a high-level, week-by-week approximation of what you’ll be working on when. Give your client a sense of how long it takes to get things done, providing a time range, if necessary. For some run-of-the-mill projects, you could fairly accurately pin down some key dates, while for other projects, you might want to avoid committing to any dates at all, but instead define the duration of each phase of a project. If you suspect a client might cause delays, because of internal bureaucracy, lack of experience, or conflicting goals, don’t commit to specific calendar dates.

There are always clients who want to get things done faster. If you ask, When do you need this by?, their answer will be Yesterday. The classic project triangle provides an apt response: Cheap. Fast. Good. Pick two. I like to add that I’m not willing to do work poorly, so really their decision is between cheap and fast. If your client must stay within a specific budget, they’ll soon realize it’s time to prepare their team for a longer timeline than they had originally hoped for. But if they absolutely need me to hustle on their project, I’ll need to bolster my resources and put aside other work, and that’s going to cost the big bucks.

Budget: How Much?

Ah…, the age-old question: How much is this gonna cost me? One of the first things most prospective clients ask me for is my hourly fee, and I tell them I don’t have one. I’m not willing to work by the hour, because I don’t believe the value of my work can be measured by the amount of time I spend working on it. What if I discover a genius insight and get the work done in half the expected time? Does that mean I deserve to be paid half as much? On the flip side, what if I spend twice the amount of time I’ve allocated to a project, reworking a solution, because I wasn’t pleased with the first design? Does this mean the client deserves to pay twice as much?

Jared Spool, a fount of knowledge and a consultant for almost his entire career, taught me to always make clients tell me their budgets for projects. It’s certainly not an easy thing to do, and you need a thick skin to do it well, but I try my damnedest to do it every time. Understanding a client’s budget up front lets you determine the appropriate scope of work for their project, taking into account all of the other variables I’ve described. If you name a price first, you create one of two scenarios:

1. Your price is wildly outside the client’s budget or out of line with competing vendors’ price tags, and the client decides they don’t want to work with you.
2. You devalue yourself.

I would argue that the latter is far, far worse.

Price is negotiable. It’s always negotiable—no matter what anyone says. Price is the explicit value a client assigns to their project’s outcome. If you increase its value, they’ll be willing to increase the price. But if they lower the price, you have every right to decrease the value as a result. Remember, you are entering into a business relationship. You aren’t taking on a project out of the kindness of your heart. You are an expert, and you provide a service that is worth paying for. If a project’s budget is limited, reduce the assigned resources, adjust the schedule accordingly, make greater demands regarding where you’ll work, and limit the activities you’ll conduct and deliverables you’ll produce.

The worst thing you can do to yourself as a consultant is to do work at any cost, out of desperation. There will always be more work, even in a down economy. If you take whatever clients are willing to pay, despite the scope of work, you not only risk the success of the project, you depreciate the value of the services you’ve provided to other clients at a higher price. The ultimate consequence would be that you’d turn what you do into a commodity. The prices of commodities fluctuate with the market, but expertise is an inelastic good, the price of which always stays high. You have the skills to warrant the price you demand. Furthermore, the bigger a project’s budget, the more respect your client will give you, and the more determined they will be to help make the project a success.

If a client isn’t willing to pay you what you’re worth, they aren’t worth working for. Explain how you can adjust the scope of their project to fit within their budget. If you define a smaller, more condensed, more focused project for your first engagement with a new client, you give yourself the opportunity to prove the impact you can have on their organization and pave the road for future, bigger-budget projects.

= Scope: What?

The why, who, how, when, and how much all add up to the what on a project—the scope. It’s a common misconception that the scope should determine all of the other variables, but the reality is that needs, resources, location, schedule, and budget really are the pre-determined constants in the situation. What you’re going to produce—the scope—results from all of those other constraints.

In order for anything to ever get done, projects need to constitute self-contained chunks of work you can realistically accomplish, given the current environment in which you and your clients find yourselves. You’ll likely need to explain that to your clients—largely because they live and breathe their work every day. Since they’re stuck with it for the long term, they might not be used to thinking about their activities in segmented phases. You’re the expert. You need to guide them through this decision-making process, and you need to do it before putting your signature on the dotted line.

Clearly defining a project’s scope before the project begins sets you up for success. Establishing shared expectations between your company and your client makes you stronger partners, reduces the distractions misinterpretations can cause, and lets you both focus on what really matters—making a product that improves people’s lives.