The Lobbi Delivery Team
Operational Systems Engineering
A complete scope has five components: the trigger condition, the transformation logic, the exception paths, the acceptance criteria, and the out-of-scope boundary. Most scopes include two and skip the rest.
The acceptance criteria is the most commonly missing piece. "Works correctly" is not a criterion. "Processes 95% of submissions without manual intervention, with a false-positive exception rate below 3%, measured over a 30-day production period" is a criterion. Acceptance criteria become test cases. Test cases become the verification standard at go-live.
Complex automations should be staged. Phase one: core happy-path automation with manual exception handling - get it into production and measure the actual exception rate. Phase two: automate the top exception paths by volume based on what phase one actually revealed. Phase three: edge cases and optimization. Staging produces a working system faster than building everything at once.
A realistic timeline adds 30 - 40% to the everything-goes-right estimate and explicitly calls out dependencies - things that must happen before build can proceed, typically in someone else's control. Those dependencies are where most project delays originate.
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