The High Cost of Undefined Scope: Why Enterprise CMS Projects Fail… Or Not

Enterprise CMS projects sometimes fail not because of bad technology, but because of bad assumptions. Here, by “failing” I don’t mean that you don’t have a working solution in the end of the day, but you have a project that went significantly overbudget and missed the original planned go-live date by a few months. As a consultant and now as a product delivery manager at Webiny, I’ve seen firsthand how crucial it is to align expectations, define scope early, and ensure every stakeholder knows their role before the first line of code is written. Recently, we worked with a large enterprise client to implement a tailored version of one of Webiny’s applications. At first glance, it seemed straightforward: define the MVP scope, customize the existing application to meet their requirements, and hand it over to their delivery partner so that they can integrate it with their existing CRM and perform some polishing and further extensions where needed. We quickly realized that scope clarity would make or break this project.