I have been asked, more than once, to recover programmes that were described, when I arrived, as too ambitious. That has almost never been the problem. The ambition was rarely the issue. The issue, in every case, was that the ambition had been priced against numbers nobody had stress-tested.
The volume number had come from a single query against a production database, run by one person, against a cut-off that was never reconciled. The productivity number had been lifted from a benchmark slide that nobody could trace to a particular firm or a particular type of file. The capacity number had been divided out of the productivity number without a working week underneath it: no allowance for QA, no ramp-up, no attrition, no leave. The plan looked precise. None of the numbers were robust.
What scoping actually is
Scoping is mostly the discipline of refusing to write a number down until you can show your working. The team will resist this in the first week. The Steering Committee will resist it more. There is always a date by which the plan has to be tabled, and the temptation to fill the gaps with a benchmark or an estimate is enormous.
The two weeks spent insisting on a real population query, a real fifty-file pilot and a real capacity model built in layers are the two weeks that decide whether the programme delivers. They are also the weeks the Programme Sponsor is most likely to argue against. The argument is usually some version of: we need to start the work. The honest answer is that the work cannot start until the numbers it is sized against are numbers somebody is willing to defend.
The artefact that holds the plan together
The single most useful artefact I produce in any scoping is the assumptions register. Not the plan, not the budget, not the slides. The register. Every number the programme depends on, with the basis on which it was derived, the named owner who derived it, and the trigger at which it must be re-tested.
By the time the Committee approves the plan, the assumptions register has more entries than the budget has lines. That is the right shape.
The register is rebuilt three times before mobilisation. Once at the end of the population work. Once at the end of the pilot. Once at the end of the mobilisation phase, the week before the Committee approves the plan. Each rebuild changes numbers. Some change materially. The discipline is that the changes are visible: the Committee sees them, signs them off, and the plan that goes forward is the plan that has been rebuilt around the latest version of the assumptions, not the plan that was tabled in week three.
Why the register matters in month four
The numbers will move. They always move. The question is whether they move inside a register the Committee can see, or outside a register that does not exist. Programmes recover when the register is opened in month four and the changes are governed. They fail when the changes are absorbed in silence until the gap between the plan and the work is wider than the programme can close.
The two versions of the programme had the same ambition at the start. Only one of them did the scoping work to make the ambition deliverable. The other ran on assumptions that were never tested, and on a Steering Committee that never saw the assumptions move because the register did not exist to hold them.
What I would do this week, if I were the Programme Sponsor
Open the latest scoping paper. Look for the assumptions register. If it is not there, ask the Programme Director for it, in writing, before the next Committee. If the register is there, look at the column for the named owner of each assumption. If the owners are missing, the register is a document, not a working artefact. If the owners are named, look at the trigger column. If the triggers are missing, the register will not be re-tested when the work begins. If the triggers are there, the register is doing its job.
Guide 009 sets out the full scoping cycle, including the population query, the file standard, the productivity pilot, the capacity model in layers and the contingency conversation the Committee should be having at mobilisation rather than at month six. Download the full guide and use the assumptions register at Appendix A as the starting point for your own.