Complex web and platform projects fail early when the problem, the content, the data and the delivery constraints stay vague.
Our industrial digital project scoping builds a usable decision base before substantial design or development spend. We align buyers, commercial objectives, product information, source systems, markets, governance and delivery phases so the team can commit with confidence.
In industrial projects the uncertainty is rarely in the design. It sits in the product data, in what the ERP or PIM can expose, in how many markets and languages are funded rather than aspirational, and in who internally owns each of those answers. Scoping exists to convert those unknowns into decisions before they turn into change requests.
We work through user needs, commercial priorities, portfolio complexity, product data sources, integrations, internal ownership, technical constraints and launch risk. That surfaces the decisions a visual concept cannot resolve on its own, and it surfaces them while they are still cheap to change.
The questions that most often reshape an industrial brief are the same each time: how many product records exist and in what condition, which system owns each attribute, how many markets and languages are funded, who signs off technical content, and what the distributor network expects to be able to do without calling anyone.
Not every valuable idea belongs in the first launch. We separate the platform capabilities that have to be delivered now from the improvements that can be validated and staged once the foundation is in place, and we make the dependency between them explicit.
That phasing is usually what makes an industrial project fundable. A first release covering the corporate site and the core catalogue, with a distributor portal and a configurator sequenced behind it, is easier to approve, easier to resource and easier to learn from than a single large programme specified entirely in advance.
Scoping is a paid phase, stated upfront, and if you proceed with us it is credited against the build, so the discovery work counts toward the project rather than being sunk cost either way.
It is also deliberately portable. The requirements, architecture and workstream breakdown are written so another agency or your internal team could price and deliver against them, which is what makes the estimate meaningful rather than a proposal wearing a discovery label.
Code Industrial is the industrial B2B practice of Code Barcelona, an agency building corporate websites and digital platforms since 2015. The same strategy, design and engineering team works on every industrial project, from the first scoping session through to life after launch.
The brief that arrives is rarely the complete requirement. Industrial digital project scoping identifies the decisions, dependencies and assumptions that need resolving before delivery is priced.
What companies ask before committing to a discovery phase.
The output is tailored to the project but typically includes audience and journey findings, information architecture, a content and product data model, the technology and integration approach, an access and permissions model, delivery phases, priorities, risks and a decision-ready scope with an estimate broken down by workstream. It is written to be handed to a delivery team and priced, rather than read once and filed.
For a complex project, yes. A sound scope prevents a platform choice or a supplier proposal from being driven by assumptions that were never tested against content, product data and operating reality. It also puts competing proposals on the same basis, since each supplier is quoting the same requirement rather than an interpretation of a short brief, which makes the comparison meaningful.
It depends on the complexity uncovered rather than on the length of the brief. A straightforward corporate site is scoped quickly. A project touching several markets, a large catalogue, two source systems and three audiences takes longer, and much of that time is spent waiting on access and answers from the people who own those systems. We would rather tell you that at the start than compress the phase artificially.
It should not change materially where the scoping was done properly, and that is the point of the phase. The gap between the estimate and the delivered cost is where budget overruns come from on projects that skipped discovery. Where scope does change, because a market is added or a source system moves, the workstream breakdown lets us adjust the affected part rather than reopening the whole number.
Access to the people rather than to a document set: whoever owns the ERP and PIM, the person responsible for technical content sign-off, someone from the commercial side, and a representative from at least one country organisation if the estate is international. Practically, we also ask for analytics access, a content and URL inventory, and a sample export of product data, since the state of that export usually answers more questions than a workshop does.
Yes, and we write it that way by default. The requirements, architecture and workstream breakdown are supplier-neutral, so you can run a competitive process on them or hand them to an internal team. Several clients commission scoping precisely for that reason, and it produces better proposals because every bidder is answering the same, tested requirement rather than guessing at what a two-page brief implied.
It is a paid phase, priced and agreed before it starts, and if you proceed with us it is credited against the build. That arrangement keeps the incentives straight: the discovery has to stand on its own as a deliverable, and you are free to take it elsewhere. We state the fee and the credit terms in writing at the outset rather than treating discovery as an unbilled part of a sales process.
Scoping is usually the first phase of a larger build. These are the services the estimate typically covers.
Tell us what you are trying to change, what is uncertain and which systems the project will have to work with. We will propose a scoping route that gives the project a credible foundation.