Often in projects, we are pretty good at establishing the big picture at the beginning, in terms of what we are trying to accomplish, and the scope of people, time and resources required to enable it.
We also become very adept at keeping an eye on scope creep, to make sure that we are delivering the thing we said we would deliver. Phrases like “that is out of scope” and “we will need to rescope if we move forward with this” have become common place whenever a change is requested in a project.
Ultimately, if the client agrees to the change in scope, and the the additional requirement for time, money, and/or resources to do so, we move ahead and make it happen. But, this is where I see both a problem and an opportunity.
The problem is that while we are coming up with great ideas for new features or elements of a project, we are not asking the question of whether it helps us further the experience we are trying to deliver as was started in the big picture discussions. Looking at this from a story perspective, we are not asking the question of “how does this further our narrative?”. When we don’t ask the question, we end up with the equivalent of a movie about a submarine crew in peril, that suddenly has to contend with the needs of a horse.
The opportunity lies in looking at the big picture of your project (whatever the project may be) as a narrative for the user experience. There are very rare instances in which what we produce will not require some kind of human interaction — whether it is for consumption, collaboration, or maintenance.
Once you have established this user experience narrative, keep it close throughout the duration of the project, to use it as a type of baseline, against which you can determine whether change requests to your project are appropriate to the intended user experience (I.e. Is it furthering that narrative) or not.
Lastly, don’t toss out those ideas that didn’t make it into your project quite yet. Just because an idea was brought up in the context of your current project, does not make it a bad idea; it’s just an idea that is not appropriate for this project. So find a way of cataloguing your unused ideas, like a type of pattern library for ideas, that you can call upon later to solve other challenges.
