Published on the 18/06/2013 | Written by Jane Smallfield
Jane Smallfield offers a few words of wisdom on not slacking when it comes to your briefs…
How good are you at writing down what you want in a brief? It sounds so simple (by its very name it’s brief) but in reality it is incredibly difficult to deliver all the information needed in the few square centimetres provided on a typical brief sheet.
Writing a novel and attaching it to your brief is not the answer either. While well intentioned, you have to face the fact no-one is going to read it. What your team is wanting is a ‘brief’ and providing more information than was asked for is not generally well received.
Realistically, the only way to ensure your brief is fully understood is to talk to it. Your brief is the guide but you need to colour it in. You also need to answer the questions you didn’t know should be asked and to get everyone’s buy in as to what success will look like; “I’ll know it when I see it” really won’t go down well.
Even if you get this right, conflict can still occur and I have recently come across two main areas of misunderstanding:
The start date
Too often we focus on the deadline and ignore the start line. This should be up for discussion. If a manager initiates a project six weeks out from deadline they quite often expect work to begin straight away; but the person working on the project may have scheduled the work to start within week six (after all it will only take them a couple of days and will still be delivered well before deadline). Neither option is necessarily the right one – but agreeing what you all expect can avoid conflict down the line.
How many rounds?
It also pays to be very specific about how many rounds of changes are in the budget and what the turn-around time is expected to be. It doesn’t matter what the project is or who the players are, it is almost impossible to deny someone the changes they are asking for, and equally difficult to have the ‘more money’ conversation if things were not made very clear at the start.
To mitigate the above, I always try to include a contingency in the budget. It is always labelled exactly as that – a contingency – and rigorously guarded so it is there for genuine cases of need.
Likewise I put a buffer in my timeline; no matter how good you are at judging the work required you can never predict the unexpected. But this information also needs to be shared. I have had some unnecessary sleepless nights meeting a client’s expectations only to discover they had built in a ‘soft’ deadline and that the real event was days away.
So, in the interests of maintaining the elastic in your briefs; take the time to tell your story and colour in the detail, while ensuring you have allowed for a few shortfalls in understanding by putting some stretch in your budget and timeline.
ABOUT JANE SMALLFIELD//
Jane Smallfield is a marketing consultant and capability builder with her own company, Proxi. She is also the current President of the New Zealand Software Association. Jane Smallfield is a marketing consultant and capability builder with her own company, Proxi. She is also the current President of the New Zealand Software Association.
