Spec Docs & Managing Scope in a Productized Service
Coaching, consulting and strategy can be a slippery thing (hard to name, hard to quantify results and hard to keep 'in scope').
So before this weekend is over (6/4/23, 12p ct), I want to have written out the bare essentials of my spec doc for Bonus Brain.
Curious - anyone else create spec docs for your productized service to keep things in scope???
Here’s what I’m outlining (informed by a dear friend of mine who’s in the food industry where they spec the sh*t out of everything 🙂):
Scope
- Describe the coaching container
- Describe the process in the coaching container
- Describe the critical control points for the coaching product
- Describe the coaching methodologies
- Describe the skills or results attained during the coaching
Assessment
- Describe how the coaching will be verified
- Did you do what you said you were going to do?
-
- How do you know
- Describe the key performance indicators for the client
- Describe the key performance indicators for the coach
Recordkeeping
- What records are required to ensure specification is met and is verifiable?
Just following up with this as a promise to myself - I'm done!
It's rough and ugly but I have a spec doc that outlines most of what I listed above. From it, I'm creating a short list of internal docs that I need; mostly Google form for assessments and docs with templates for recurring process. I also want to create a list of automations for these things to but into play in the next building iteration. For now, this part is enough!
In the last 24 hours I've also created an internal time estimate per customer for me to measure myself against going forward.
I think I'll put all the assessment stuff into a spreadsheet to review at my monthly review times.
Happy building folks!