For many new independent workers, the excitement of working on your own and having the ability to receive multiple paychecks from clients is usually followed by the trepidation of not knowing how to manage and execute a project by yourself.
It’s one thing to perform a specific task within a large organization.
It’s a whole different beast to be end-to-end responsible for delivering a project to a client fully on your own.
This post will begin a short project management series where we go through the high-level process of planning out a project and keeping all the relevant players on task through to finish. We’ll go into the basics of scoping in this article, with the other steps in the process coming after. The diagram below shows the major parts within project management for independents and consultants: Scoping, Process Admin, Communication, and Timelines.
What is Project Scoping and Cost Estimating?
Project scoping is the process of determining and documenting all the project goals, deliverables, tasks, deadlines, and associated costs. Scoping the project starts with the very first client conversation, and nearly always involves changes throughout the planning stages (and often changes during execution).
What you don’t want to do is bid for a project through guesstimating the numbers by yourself and underestimating the cost of the project in terms of both time and money. Yes, winning a project bid feels nice, but the good feelings are rapidly erased when you realize it’ll cost you more than you bargained for.
Having a well-defined project scope helps avoid common problems between you and the client. I’ve had clients who request a completely different set of requirements than what we had spoken about during the first few conversations. While changing your mind is expected, what you want to avoid is getting to the end of the engagement and the outcome is far different from what was agreed upon upfront. This usually means that the cost also ends up far from what was expected during scoping, and possibly that the timeline has taken longer than was planned.
If you end up in this position, it’s easy to blame the client. Instead, as the expert consultant, it’s your fault. You are responsible for scoping as accurately as possible using the client’s input and pushing the project along to stick to expected deadlines.
Here are some of the best practices to mitigate scoping derailment and not blow up your budget.
Agree On A Scope Statement
I discussed in my earlier post about the difference between a consultant and a gig worker. A gig worker is brought on when there is a highly defined and specific task to be done. Compared to gig workers, a consultant is more highly valued (and paid) for their ability to assess a range of situations and co-develop an optimal outcome with the client.
For example, let’s say a private hospital system needs a new website and they have a competitor with a website that is outstanding. The private hospital will hire a gig worker if what they need is to replicate exactly the same website that the competitor has. Alternatively, they will hire a consultant to understand the root of their wish for a new website (attract more patients, get more donations, etc.) and work with them to develop a distinct website that serves their unique needs.
Since you are a high-value consultant, you must develop a scope statement that defines what you will and will not be doing within the client engagement. The scope statement includes deliverables, exclusions, constraints, and assumptions.
Your aim in the early stages of working with any client is to clearly define what the scope of the project is. This can be done through discussions, interviews, surveys, focus groups, or whichever means that helps you clearly understand stakeholder requirements and expectations. Write down the project requirements, expectations, budgets, and deliverables into a well-detailed document of the service you will be delivering.
It is just as important to write what you will not be delivering as it is to write what you will be delivering. Clients must know that any changes to you expected delivery will require a change control. We will go into this in more detail within the Process Admin article of this Project Management series.
Project Breakdown or Workplan
After defining the scope of the project, break down all the activities that are involved and assign a task to each relevant team member. If you are fully working independently with no additional support, the team is you. Being a solo team of one doesn’t means you don’t need anybody to complete the work. There are likely key persons on the client side or external parties who you will need to keep informed or consulted during different action items. Your project breakdown should show each task with who is involved and by when it needs to happen.
A breakdown can be as simple as an excel spreadsheet or more complicated with many people involved. Try different project management software to see what works best for you or create your own system of reminders and prompts.
Client Validation
The single most important part of project scoping is getting your client to sign off on the agreement. Your client should be involved in scoping well before the formal validation. At each step of initial scoping, be sure that the client is adding, removing, and reprioritizing the requirements to fit their needs AND budget.
Be very, very clear with the client that the requirements determine the cost. This is the part about transparency that works in your favor. If you go away on your own and come up with numbers out of a black box, your client will not understand the budget increases that you may need to bill them for. The scoping process is a guesstimate, which means it is often comes with a margin of error. with your client to form this guesstimate, your expertise will help them understand that their needs—not an hourly rate—are what determine the project costs.
In the next Managing article, I’ll discuss the importance of teaching your client about how you work and setting their expectations of your engagement process.
