Scoping interactive projects – any progress?

It occurred to us that a lot of progress should have been made in scoping practices for interactive projects because, as we all now accept, the initial stages of defining a project make or break it. We have always given away detailed questionnaires for the scoping stage in our courses and books, and advocated that people tailor them to suit their needs/company practices. But our implication was that you had to have one!

We have been disappointed in our present search for on-the-ball scoping questionnaire templates for interactive media projects. We assume that you are all using something to define the projects that you take on, so where are these? It may well be that they are considered so valuable and business sensitive that they remain shrouded in mystery. Actually ‘econsultancy’ has a template for assessing social media needs (among other templates with a marketing perspective) but you’ll have to pay £250 for it. See econsultancy.com.

It seems that despite being a few years old now, our scoping questionnaire remains a good basis for defining projects. But, we have found some extra recent advice for you. Derryn Cotezee outlines 10 key questions for web projects. He covers essentials like users, time, turnaround, competitors, likes, features and so on. See www.xtmotion.co.uk.

Elizabeth Sosnow finds 11½ questions needed for defining the scope of a social media project. This covers things like: what’s driving the client to do this, who will they wish to reach, timing, integration with other marketing strategies, content, and audience behaviour among others.

Louie Conceicao uses a delightful set of images to show the course of a project and how it doesn’t meet what the client wanted because of all the mis-interpretations over the scope. His title says it all. Project Scope Documents Help Manage Client Expectations.

Well, anyone out there prepared to share their scoping templates? We all need them.