When a redesign slips, people usually look for the cause in how fast the team works. What actually breaks the schedule is nearly always a scope with no completion condition. Nobody wrote down what “done” means, so when one more thing gets added there is no ground on which to object.
The first document a planner should produce is not a list of screens. It is a scope document, and its opening page lists not the work but the work you are not doing.
Scope comes out of a single sentence of intent
“We are redesigning the site” is not an intent. An intent says what must be different once the project ends: “shorten the path a visitor takes to reach the enquiry form”, or “let editors publish case studies without a developer”. With sentences like those in hand, every later request can be judged on one question — does it serve this sentence?
One to three sentences is about right. Past five it stops being intent and becomes a wish list, and a wish list lets you decline nothing. A criterion that cannot refuse anything is not a criterion.
Put the exclusions at the front
A to-do list only ever grows. A not-doing list does not — which is precisely why it is the tool that holds scope. Write it in flat, declarative sentences: “this project does not add e-commerce”, “translation is out of scope”, “existing blog posts move across as they are and are not rewritten”.
This is not a document you read once at kick-off. It is the one you put on screen at the start of every review, because if it is not written down, everyone remembers a slightly different scope.
A place to put the borderline requests
Requests that begin with “while we are at it” will arrive. Refusing them is not the goal, because most of them are perfectly reasonable. The goal is to have decided in advance where they go. Keep a “next phase” column beside the scope document and move everything out of scope into it.
That column changes the character of the conversation. Instead of “no”, you say “not this time — I am putting it in the next phase”, and the person who asked can see their request has not evaporated. In practice that column becomes the starting point for the following project.
Sometimes scope genuinely has to grow. When it does, record what moves with it in the same place: the date slips, something else comes out, or the budget rises. An agreement that expands scope while adjusting none of the three is not an agreement — it is a deferred incident.
More on pinning process down in writing lives in the development workflow archive, and how the delivery stages break down in practice is published on our process page.
Next part
With scope written, the question of who approves it remains. The next part covers stakeholder alignment — and where a project stalls when three people can veto but nobody can approve.