Erin Rollenhagen Enlightens the Inexperienced About Proper Project Scoping

Defining the Scope of a Project

"I've seen people build a fifty-thousand dollar website to discover why they didn't need that website," Mike Colwell, Executive Director of the Business Innovation Zone, noted. "I know there is a better way," he declared before turning the floor over to Erin Rollenhagen. Rollenhagen is the founder of Entrepreneurial Technologies and coder extraordinaire, who would provide the intimate crowd at the August BIZ luncheon with an illuminating presentation on what should be known before the coding begins.

"For many of our customers we are their second or even third developer," she shared. "Most have had a bad experience where it cost twice as much as they thought it would, took twice as long as they thought it would and when they got done, the product didn't really work the way they thought it would." This trifecta of failure, she would argue, would track back to not spending enough time on the front-end defining the project scope.

"I've had people who, when we would begin asking the necessary questions, would stop us and say 'just start coding,' and we have lost those clients," she related while commenting that they were the clients she would want to lose. "We want to do the things that will make the project successful, and if that is not what the client wants, it is probably not a good fit."