Class 13 · Movement 02
Scoping
Assessment
Session 13 · Consulting
Session 13 · The hazard

Scope creep isn’t a feeling — it’s measured.

52%

of projects report scope creep (PMI Pulse — up from 43%), with budgets overrunning by ~27% on average — half of all projects, drifting.

The AI trap — and it’s aimed at you

“AI collapses the client’s perception of marginal cost — if the agent wrote the first workflow in a day, extending it ‘should be free.’” Every partner will feel this. Most will say it out loud.

The counter, stated once and kept: the day of typing was never the cost. What you spend — and defend — is review, integration, testing, and liability. The agent didn’t collapse those; it made them the whole job.
PMI Pulse of the Profession · compendium Part II — “Contracts & Cash” · “Pricing the Work”
Session 13 · The discipline

Scope is a wall you build together.

1Exclusions, by name

“If the scope doesn’t say what’s excluded, every adjacent ask is arguably included.” Write the out-of-scope list with names on it — invoices, payroll, the website refresh.

2Deliverables define scope

Scope is the list of deliverables — not hours, not effort, not vibes. If it’s not a named deliverable, it’s not in.

3Acceptance criteria

Every milestone = deliverable + written criteria + deadline. “Done” is agreed before the work starts — you learned this rule shipping your own site.

4The change-order machine

Request → written change order (what changes · cost · timeline) → written approval → then work. Never in reverse order.

Compendium Part II — SOW discipline, near-verbatim rules
Session 13 · Why only one

Narrow scope is economics, not modesty.

Exhibit: Palantir’s own S-1 · fiscal 2019
Newest customers (“acquire” cohort) — revenue that year$0.6MSame cohort — contribution loss−$65.4M

Getting embedded is brutally expensive — even for Palantir, the first year of a relationship burns a hundred times what it earns. Surviving it means keeping the first engagement narrow. One deliverable is economics, not modesty.

The professional gate

Real firms sell paid discovery at 5–15% of the build budget; its deliverable is a fixed quote plus a prototype — “the client buys certainty, the firm gets paid to de-risk its own bid.” The AI-era edge: prototype before quote — estimation becomes measurement.

Your version — free is not unscoped: every engagement runs on a signed scope memo, written acceptance criteria, and a change-log. A professional experience that mirrors a paid one — that’s the point of the semester.
Palantir S-1 (2019 cohort economics) · compendium Part II — phase-gating
Session 13 · The moment

“While you’re in there, just have the AI also…”

“This is great. While you’re in there — just have the AI also do the invoices. That’s easy for it, right?”

the wrong answer“Sure, it’s easy” — and now invoices are in scope, unpriced, unverified, and yours forever.
the right answer — practice it out loud

“That’s a genuinely good candidate. Let me write it up as a change order so we can decide it properly with the scope memo open.”

CHANGE ORDER №2adds: invoice import · touches: inventory DB, QuickBooks export · costs: ~1 week of our time · pushes: owner training to week 13 · decision: accept / defer past the primary deliverable / decline · approved (owner signature): ______
In a free engagement the currency is time and the deliverable list — the owner signs the same way. The default against the one-deliverable rule is “after the primary ships”: accepted, deferred, or declined — never silently absorbed. Next class: the scoped thing ships — verified, gated, reversible.
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