The situation
Scope documents were produced from templates that had accumulated rather than been designed. The same information was re-entered in several places. Nothing checked whether what you typed made sense. The output varied in quality depending on who built it and how much time they had.
What we built
Rebuilt templates, designed rather than inherited.
- Information is entered once and flows to everywhere it appears.
- Error checking is built in, so mistakes surface while the document is being written rather than after it is issued.
- A clean, consistent structure, so a scope reads as a professional document regardless of who produced it.
The result
Scope documents take less time to produce and contain fewer errors. The consistency is the part that compounds: when every document has the same shape, the people downstream stop having to work out how to read each one.