As any good project leadership team, you should have scheduled a project scoping exercise, also known as Discovery Exercise (and we like to call it Business Process Review & Re-engineering exercise ). Creating a plan in the form of detailed project scope approved by all stakeholders is absolutely a must. However, many teams get carried away in the details. Running a discovery exercise with a team of 3 or more soon turns out into a 'wishlist competition' (i.e. more ideas I have in the scope, more valuable is my involvement). Putting all ideas on white-board or on paper are absolutely fine.

"Ability of project teams to focus and strip down scope to 20% of original wishlist is the single most important success factor"

After all, only 20% of what you'd like to have will have much greater impact on the success of your project than the other 80%.

Driving focus is not easy. It takes practice and of course corrections along the way. There are many techniques of doing this. We use color coded stickies or post-its during our discovery sessions to prioritize and organize those 20% ideas against the rest.