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A scoping study, in seven lines

A reusable format. Take it, fill it, use it again — before a project, before a bid, before agreeing to something. Nothing in it is specific to one field.

Download scoping-study-format.md The file you fill in. Plain text — open it in any editor, or hand it to an agent.

What this is for

A scoping study is a bounded look at something you have not decided to do yet. You do not know enough to commit, so you spend a fixed and small amount of time finding out, and then you decide.

The difficulty is never the looking. It is that a scoping study has no natural end: there is always one more paper, one more person to talk to, one more comparable project. So the format is mostly about the ending — when you stop, what would let you stop early, and what you will actually do with what you found.

Write the last line first. THE VERDICT says what you will do differently depending on what you find, and it is written before you look. A study whose verdict is decided afterwards is a study that will find whatever you already wanted.

The format

THE QUESTION    what you do not know, in one sentence

THE BOX         how long you will look, decided before you start
WHERE YOU LOOK  the places you will go, and the ones you are skipping
WHAT COUNTS     what would count as an answer, and what would not
STOP EARLY      what you could find that ends this before the box does
THE VERDICT     what you do differently for each answer you might get

NOT THIS        it is not the project, and it does not become the project

A question above, a refusal below, and five lines between.

What each line is asking

THE QUESTION. One sentence, and it is a question you could be wrong about. Understand the landscape is not one. Is anyone already doing this with people who have no reliable internet is. If it takes a paragraph you have several studies, and they have different boxes.

THE BOX. How long, decided now. Two days, six hours, one afternoon. The number is not an estimate of how long the answer takes to find — nobody knows that — it is how much you are willing to spend before deciding without it. Deciding on thin evidence is a legitimate outcome and this line is what makes it a choice rather than a failure.

WHERE YOU LOOK. The places you will go, and — the half people leave out — the ones you are skipping. Naming what you are not looking at is what stops the box quietly expanding, and it tells whoever reads the study how much weight it can carry.

WHAT COUNTS. What would count as an answer, and what would not. Three people saying the same thing in interviews, or one working example you can open. Say it now, because at hour five anything that resembles an answer will look like one.

STOP EARLY. What you could find that ends this before the box runs out. Usually there are two: something that answers the question outright, and something that makes the question moot. The second is the valuable one, and it is the reason a scoping study can be the cheapest thing you ever do.

THE VERDICT. What you do differently for each answer you might get. Two or three branches, written before you look. If every branch leads to the same action, you were not scoping — you were building a case, and you can stop now and save the box.

NOT THIS. It is not the project. A scoping study that starts producing the thing has stopped being a study and nobody will notice, because the output looks like progress. Say what would count as having crossed that line.

A worked one

THE QUESTION    Can students run this on the machines they already own,
                or does it need a lab?

THE BOX         One afternoon.
WHERE YOU LOOK  Ask eight of them what they have. Try it on the two
                oldest machines I can borrow. Not asking the IT
                department, and not reading vendor requirements.
WHAT COUNTS     It runs, unassisted, on both borrowed machines. Or it
                does not, on either.
STOP EARLY      If the first borrowed machine cannot install it at all,
                that is the answer and I stop at an hour.
THE VERDICT     Runs on both: it stays a bring-your-own course.
                Runs on neither: I book the lab and cut the second half.
                Runs on one: I ask the other seven and re-scope.

NOT THIS        Not building the teaching material for it. If I find
                myself writing the worksheet, the study ended and I
                did not notice.

Note that STOP EARLY made the afternoon into an hour, and that the middle branch of THE VERDICT does not decide anything — it says the study was too small, which is a real result and one you can only see if the branches were written in advance.

How to use it

  1. Write THE QUESTION and THE VERDICT first, in that order, before anything else. Everything between them is instrumentation.
  2. Set THE BOX by what the decision is worth, not by how interesting the question is. An afternoon for a decision you could reverse; two days for one you could not.
  3. Say out loud when the box starts. A box that begins whenever you happen to start has not begun.
  4. Stop when it stops. If the answer is not there, THE VERDICT still applies — one of its branches is for that, or should be.
  5. Write nothing up beyond the seven lines and what you found. A scoping study that turns into a report has spent its saving.

Three ways a scoping study fails

It has no verdict. You looked, you learned things, and the decision is exactly where it was. The finding was interesting, which is what it will be remembered for, and it changed nothing.

It becomes the project. The prototype built to test feasibility is now the prototype, with none of the decisions in it taken deliberately. This is the most common one and it feels like efficiency the entire time it is happening.

It confirms. Every branch of THE VERDICT led to the thing you were going to do anyway. Written down in advance this is visible in a minute; discovered afterwards it is invisible for ever, because a study that agrees with you never looks like a study that failed.

Prayas Abhinav. Licensed CC BY 4.0 — copy it, change it, build on it, including commercially. Say where it came from, and if you changed it.

Take a copy: scoping-study-format.md. Yours to alter.