A project may have a detailed and comprehensive set of requirements, but you may still be left asking “what is this project really all about?” or more specifically “what is the problem that we are trying to solve?”. This is exactly the situation we found ourselves in during a recent distributed software development project. This article discusses the importance of scenarios of usage in regaining a focus for the project. It reflects on the need for effective communication of such scenarios and, based on our experiences, recommendations for best practice in applying the UML.