tl;dr: I work at a small company with a development team of 5-10 people, lately we have been asked to present "scope documents" for effectively all of our work before we carry out the actual work, with seemingly no regard given for the magnitude of work required.
I worry that I am often spending more time writing scope documents about small enhancements than I am actually performing the enhancement.
Before I explain my question better, let me establish a few baseline viewpoints on the situation.
I understand creating these documents can be considered training exercises for when the team grows larger and the current members take on lead roles. I am not against this and I think it's a valuable training experience. I just feel that the documents aren't always necessary which may lead to wasted time, being a small company it feels we are already pressed for time and resources.
I understand a product and/or project scope is absolutely necessary when beginning an endeavor on an entirely new product, I can also recognize the importance of the documents in maintaining order in a structured and distributed development team (many team members + project leader). And of course scopes are absolutely mandatory when dealing with 3rd party customers wishing to contract our development work.
I understand the need to ensure that a developer fully understands the request before engaging in work, however I am left asking myself whether or not these small enhancements, even if misunderstood, could end up taking more time than it takes to write, review, revise, and signoff the respective scope documents.
With the above understanding in mind, excuse the length of this post, but to describe my issues:
My questions come about in situations where our development team is applying relatively small enhancements to our own internal software. Small enhancements such as adding a single new button to a web UI that performs a simple operation, or adding a new action handler (basically 1 function) to a backend system.
These small enhancements may indirectly bring in revenue as they increase the value of our product, but we aren't directly selling these new enhancements independently. This leaves little room for any sort of scope regarding cost vs return.
All that is left is a scope detailing the expected outcome, why we're doing it, and the expected hourly work breakdown (which is often hugely over-estimated). These documents will sometimes go back and forth with discussion over small issues which could often have been applied to the enhancement after it was completed anyway, revisions will be made to the documents to reflect the decisions made in this process.
I can't help but feel like we are wasting a lot of valuable developer time writing these documents, where the minor enhancement could go through a first iteration of development in the same amount of time it takes to write the initial document. Then the time spent reviewing the document could instead be spent reviewing the code, and instead of revising the document time could be spent revising and finalizing the code -- the end result in this situation (to me) is a enhancement which took almost exactly as long as the scope/documentation phase would have taken.
My main questions being: (In the context of a small development team)
Are we taking the right approach to scoping/planning and developing?
Is there any rules of thumb that we should be following with regards to these processes?
Is there any red flags in anything above which indicates I should be looking to adjust my viewpoint on the situation?
Is there any way I can improve the situation while keeping everybody happy?
All insight would be greatly appreciated.