Discovery Operations Guide
Determine Project Scale
Scale and Scope
Project Scale / Scope and Problem Frame have a lot to do with one another. The naming can also be confusing because Project Frame can also be called Project Scope. In this Op Guide, we will keep the Frame / Scope separate from Scale by referring to the project’s conceptual constraints as the Project Frame, and the operations and logistical constraints as the Project Scale.
Broadly, you can think of the difference through these questions:
Problem frame answers what and why: What are you studying? And why? What is your reasoning for this study? Problem Scale answers how and where: How will you study your problem? Where will you execute that study?
This Guide uses four elements to help you determine Project Scale: number of teammates, number and type of stakeholders, number of locations, and number and type of deliverables required by the project. These are not the only elements to use when evaluating your project’s scale, but they are useful ones.
Use your best judgment to weight the importance of these items when first determining your scale / scope. Always try to keep the scale as small as possible, as it will help you stay inside your Problem Frame.
Resist the urge to include on the team everyone who seems to be related to the project. You can keep people informed of how the project is going without inviting them into the core research or stakeholder teams. Identifying site types also contributes to your understanding of your project as a whole. Are you working inside a single institution? If so, what does that mean for this stage of your project; do you think you might need to investigate other locations to round out your research, or does the single location fulfill the needs of the project? If you are traveling to many sites, what does that mean? Do you need to visit all these sites in order to have a well-rounded, throughly researched project, or could you edit down and keep the project tighter and more precise?
You must be honest with yourself and your goals when evaluating your site type in light of the project needs. Visiting the right kind and number of sites means strong, focused, yet in-depth work; visiting too few or too many sites can either limit you and the team or spread you too thin.
General Project Scale
Small Scale
A Small Scale project is one in which you have one research team of 2-3 teammates, a single, individual stakeholder, such as a group or department Director, a single location, and a single deliverable.
Teammates: Teams should always be at least two people: one person to perform HCD Interviews, one to take notes.
Stakeholder: A stakeholder can be the person who gave your team the initial project brief, a person who is a regular project partner with your office and approached you or your leadership with a specific project, or someone you or your leadership approached.
Location: Understanding the physical location of research matters. Physical location can mean buildings, but it can also be virtual. The internet is a real place.
Deliverable: Deliverables can include reports, lists, white papers, journey maps, or a variety of other outputs from a project. When you begin, work with your stakeholder to define this form but not its content. The deliverable content must accurately and minutely reflect your research, including the voice of the research participants and any other group(s) studied.
Small/Medium Scale
A Small / Medium Scale project is one in which you have one research team of 2-3 teammates, multiple stakeholders, and either a single, complicated deliverable or a few smaller ones.
Teammates: For a Small/Medium scale project, a single research team of two to three people is sufficient.
Stakeholder: The Stakeholder count should still be quite small, a maximum of two individuals or groups.
Location: A Small/Medium scale project should be limited to a single research location.
Deliverable: A deliverable in a Small/Medium scale project could be a single, difficult or multi-part task, like the evaluation of a long-standing system and recommendations on how to change it, or the documentation and compilation of several different work processes for review. If your deliverables sound similar to the scale of these tasks, then you know you have a Small/Medium scale project instead of a straight forward, Small scale project.
Medium/Large Scale
A Medium / Large project is one with more than one research team (4-8 teammates), multiple Stakeholders including Institutional Stakeholders, multiple locations, and multiple deliverables.
Teammates: Projects that require more than one research team because of timeline, participant, or team members’ availability should be treated as Medium / Large Scale. Tracking and including multiple team members requires extra effort that must be calculated into the total effort required by the project.
Stakeholder: Sometimes stakeholders can be a mixture of individuals and offices or organizations. In this case, it’s important to know the points of contact for the institutional stakeholders and keep them informed so they can report on the project to their larger organization.
Locations: LEven if you’re operating in a single department or region, if your team must perform research in a physical location as well as online, such as in the case of telemedicine, then the project has multiple locations involved.
Deliverables: Deliverables could be multiple or simply large scale. As deliverables get larger, it’s important to have detailed conversations with your stakeholders regarding formats. Always follow the research; change the deliverable format if you need to; do not adapt what the research directs you towards to fit the deliverable format.
Large Scale
A Medium / Large project is one with more than one research team (4-8 teammates), multiple Stakeholders including Institutional Stakeholders, multiple locations, and multiple deliverables.
Teammates: If you have multiple teams in the field, have ways for each team to report their findings on a weekly basis. This can be a shared document, a template document, or a template slide deck. Reporting on a regular cadence ensures that data is not lost in the course of the teams’ activities.
Stakeholder: A big stakeholder group immediately means a big project scale / scope. Keeping your stakeholders informed, involved, and aligned is a necessary and energy-heavy task. If you do not have the bandwidth to do this, consider asking your leadership if you and the team could break the project down into several smaller projects.
Locations: Lots of locations means a lot of travel. This brings with it several potential problems, including submitting for and receiving travel permission, factoring in drive or fly time, and considering team members’ energy levels. If at all possible, never have team members travel and perform research all in one day. It’s a recipe for team exhaustion, and the quality of your research will suffer.
Deliverables: Deliverables at this scale require time to produce. Be sure to build in production time at the end of your research process to make the deliverables that your research, your leadership, and your stakeholders deserve. Do not risk all your hard work by not giving yourself enough time to make excellent deliverables. Allow yourself to deliver strong outputs that reflect your work’s quality.
Framework for Scale and Scope
Based on the guidelines in the previous pages, use this outline to codify your project’s scale / scope.
