Engaging Customers to Manage Their Project Scope

Reducing project scope to at least within shouting distance of available resources and time has the potential to create an adversarial relationship between the application development community and our customers, whose needs we must meet. But it doesn’t have to be that way. We can actively engage our customers in managing their requirements, and their project scope, to assure quality and timeliness of software outcomes.

This conclusion is based on two critical in sights: 1) It is in our customer’s best financial interest to meet her external commitments to her marketplace. Therefore, delivering a high-quality—and if necessary, a scope-reduced application—on time and on budget is the highest overall benefit that we developers can provide; and, 2) the application, its key features, and the business needs that it fulfills all belong to the customer, rather than the application development team.