I was a Scout leader for awhile. In Canada, the Scout Law asks a scout “to be wise in the use of all resources.” To a certain extent, resources determine the scope of our work. We have to cut our coat to suit our cloth. There’s a degree of honesty in that, though, when it comes to project scoping. We may end up tailoring our project to success rather than to fulfilling the actual goal.

The goal is key. What is it you are trying to accomplish? This may be the stage where we most fail as leaders. We must be able to clearly define what it is we want to do and why. If we can’t be clear at this point, it’s hardly surprising when projects go awry.

Sometimes we are told to accomplish a goal for someone else. This is common when the law library is part of an institution. Mine new sources and activate new tools for a business development pivot. Broaden the collection to support a new research center or faculty star. Increase services to self-represented parties. Someone, somewhere else in the organization, is tasking the law library to get to a goal.

The law library may also be part of a broader organizational goal but not directly accountable. IT may be tasked to fulfill some need that overlaps library systems or responsibilities. This can require communication and trust.

This isn’t about scope creep, though, when a scope gets modified as the project is underway. Sometimes we over-scope our project, wasting resources because we’re risk averse. Sometimes we underscope, leaving risk in order to have a “win.”

It can be complicated.

Boiling the Ocean

I wince when I hear – I tend to hear it more than read it – people say about a given decision that it is “too little, too late.” Everyone wishes for perfection, for the right thing to be done at the right moment. But decision-making is messy and we do not always have the resources we need to get things done the right way.

Some of this comes down to our risk analysis for a decision. I have found this to be particularly true in organizations that have a public perception to maintain. There will be a wish to minimize risk to avoid embarrassment or negative public perceptions. It is not about the goal, whatever it is. The goal becomes secondary to ancillary issues.

These projects can attempt to boil the ocean – to do everything, even if everything isn’t necessary to achieve the goal. In my mind, it usually means the goal has been mischaracterized. Perhaps it’s unachievable.

I was thinking this as I sat in a hotel in Buffalo a week or so ago. I had not intended to be in that hotel. I had intended on being home. But here I was, a handful of miles from the US-Canada border, checking my email.

The Canadian government is worried, as many nations are, about the spread of the coronavirus. The US-Canada border has been closed for about 15 months now. I have had to cross it a half dozen times to take a kid to university or to retrieve them from one. It’s a stressful activity. Our travel isn’t deemed essential and so each trip is essentially allowed at the discretion of the US border guards.

I complained on social media about how unclear the situation was. I won’t take any credit but I was glad to see there are now specific examples of who is and is not exempt from the testing. It would have saved me a couple of hours trying to figure it out on my own, calling Global Affairs Canada and the Canada Border Patrol.

Initially, it was discretionary both ways. But the relentlessness of the virus has meant that Canada has imposed new restrictions. You need to arrive at the border with a negative COVID test. This test has to be taken within 72 hours of arriving at the border. It has meant that a trip I could make in a day has now become a 2 or 3 day trip.

Even when laws are frustrating to me, I try to comply. So I crossed the border early, appealing to the discretion of a US border guard to allow me to come in 2 days early. This would enable me to get the test I needed to return home. I got my test and hung out with my kid.

Here’s the hitch, though. I don’t have the ability to process a COVID test. I took the test and was told it could be from 2 to 7 days for results by the people who do have the ability to process a test. I’d built 2 days in hopeful that I’d get results. That’s all it had taken on a previous trip. But this time, they didn’t show up.

The process has also included a Health Canada employee visiting our house. We complete daily check-ins to confirm we have no symptoms. And we get periodic automated phone calls to confirm we’re at home. There’s no validation of responses in any of these three contexts.

We drove to the border, checking our email as we went. But it became clear that the results weren’t coming and so we grabbed a hotel in New York. We only had a 72 hour window, though, so they’d need to come by noon the next day or we’d have to make a choice. Get another test or go to the border and risk the $3000 fine.

In the end, the results came after breakfast and we packed up and returned home. This involved a COVID test at the border. We drove home to a two week quarantine and I’ve just completed a third test from home.

So boo hoo me. But I would feel better about this if I understood the goal. If the goal is to minimize coronavirus transmission, I’m not sure all of this helps. The border guards are still focused on physical surface hygiene – washing every surface you touch – even though we know it’s the airborne droplets that create the greater risk.

When you’re establishing a goal, there may be some data you can use. In the case of coronavirus transmission by land travelers, Canada knows that about 0.3% of visitors test positive at the border. That sort of data is helpful for making a risk assessment.

Over-scoping may happen when the cost to eliminate as much as risk as possible belongs to someone else: tax payers, dues payers, other corporate departments who do not have a say in whether they expend the money. It is always easier to spend other people’s money. It’s like a tailor just taking cloth off the people walking by the shop.

It’s hard to know but I believe 100% of people tested are non-essential (non-exempt from testing). Which means that 100% of land travelers will, like us, drive directly home and self-quarantine for 2 weeks. Even without any testing, it would seem as though the quarantine would limit our ability to transmit the virus. Canada added tests though, so those in quarantine are tested twice to confirm that they still don’t have the virus. It is not clear to me how I would have gotten the virus since arriving home.

Unlike in law libraries, there’s also the science. There may be benefits to multiple testing and the current approach will gather more data for decision-makers, something that wasn’t happening at the start of the pandemic.

As a participant in all this, it feels as though the government is trying to boil the ocean. Government resources – or any non-commercial context – and politics may mean that it is easier to throw money at the situation than to engage in real risk analysis. It is harder too participate in this approach, I think, now that half of our family (who were in the US) are fully vaccinated and everyone else has their first shot. If the risk assessment changes during the project, then the scope may need to be revisited.

Scope for Success

The opposite side is to under-scope your project. This is a tricky line. You obviously want to scope your project so that you are successful. But do you narrow the scope because of risk of failure or because of a lack of resources? The former seems to me to be more about a lack of confidence, and that is not a reason for narrowing your scope.

Many law libraries will have experienced this if they have responsibility for a service or context that overlaps a corporate one. Let’s say that the IT department has to bring all of the organizations web properties into compliance with a law. Outside of law firms, it would not be unusual for the law library to operate its own IT or web properties in isolation from the corporate site. It might be a library blog or Libguides or other online resource that it was easier to host externally than to use internal corporate IT resources.

The ideal world would involve the corporate IT unit working with other units, including the law library, who have impacted resources. This would involve cooperation, resource sharing, and communication. It’s not impossible but it’s harder.

An alternative for the corporate IT unit is to under scope. This would mean that the corporate project would only make compliant the web properties that the IT team had responsibility for. Each corporate unit with web properties would have a separate responsibility for bringing them into compliance.

It raises a number of issues. Perhaps the largest risk is that, by not taking a holistic approach, some corporate web properties will remain non-compliant. The non-IT units may not have their own technical teams or the approved budget to remediate web properties for compliance. It highlights a corporate issue too, which seems to be evergreen: is IT properly resourced and accountable for its role, and do the decision-makers who give IT project goals understand the limits of their reach.

An under-scoped project may be an easier success. But it may also omit resources and create risk in exchange for that easy win. If your goal is narrowed for success and to avoid stretching your team or resources, you may be under-utilizing your resources. Your tailoring may be wasteful and skimpy.

It can sometimes be hard to analyze your own decision-making. I think I tend towards bootstrapping. I like to build teams that have internal strengths and resiliency. This is driven, in part, by not always having access to resources (like corporate IT) and needing to still find ways to achieve goals. Law libraries don’t always have all the resources they might want and so building internal skills can help the library continue through dips in resources.

Under-scoping can then miss opportunities for your staff to grow. Or to build relationships and improve communication with other teams. It places success before organizational growth.

I’ve got a week to go in my quarantine. I am looking forward to being out in the open air again, taking the dog for a walk, even doing errands. I’m actually fine leaving the yard work to the kids! But the pandemic will leave me with a deeper appreciation of the need to balance risk and resources when scoping out projects.