The engagement began before it was an engagement: reviewing the SCADA statement of work, which is where the terms of the whole thing get set and where most of the eventual trouble is either avoided or written in. It ran through to firewall and switch delivery.
Reviewing the statement of work and delivering against it are usually different parties, and the gap between them is where scope goes missing. Holding both is the arrangement that produces an engagement nobody has to renegotiate at the halfway point — and it is why the Center of Excellence review of statements of work sat inside the practice’s gate rather than in a sales process.
The subject matter is the oldest thread on this record. Utility SCADA is where the consulting career started in 1999, and arriving back at a gas and electric estate twenty-five years later — this time with the IT/OT boundary an established discipline rather than something being reasoned out from first principles — is a reasonable measure of how far the field moved and how little the underlying argument changed.
Outcome
An engagement scoped correctly at the statement of work and still held by the same people at delivery.