Why your brief is wrong and how to perfect it
Have an idea for a project? Start with a structured way of working.
Realise your business has a problem
Picture the scene: an idea for a project comes up. Something exciting that should help meet some of the objectives your business has.
You’ve raised the business opportunity case for it explaining what it is you want to do, how long it will take and how much money it will cost.
However, when it comes to briefing teams in to what needs to be done, things start to fall apart. Briefs are seemingly bespoke to each project, contain very little about what the business needs to achieve and how they can measure the success of it.
As an agency, we’ll often see briefs that include the solution baked in. We take the opportunity to delve a little deeper and go back to the partner with the news that this brief might not meet any one of their business objectives.
Also, the point of working with other experts is to use their expertise, rather than baking in the solution to a half-baked problem statement?
I understand though. In pretty much every facet of work, we don’t get taught how to do this stuff at school. When you find yourself in charge of a team, your manager may have an old template somewhere for a brief, but it’s rarely been challenged.
I’ve seen one-page briefs, multi-page briefs, PowerPoint decks, emails — the lot. Some have very little information.
How to articulate and understand problem
We use discovery workshops for this very reason. A partner may come to us with an idea for a project or with a requirement for something completely different, like re-platforming a booking engine, but through the workshop, we’ll discover deeper problems. Problems, that are probably more important to solve.
The classic case is a website redesign. You rarely need a website redesign.
What you probably need to do is collect the problems you’re experiencing. They may include:
- poor growth
- low product awareness
- an increase in complaints
- inability to innovate
- lack of knowledge
We like using the Lightning Decision Jam exercise for this very reason. It takes your business problems, reframes them as challenges and then we put together multiple solutions that could solve them, prioritising based on effort/impact. We’re actually offering Lunch and Learn sessions for this very reason — more over here.
3. How to put that into a useful format for an agency
Once you understand the problem you want to solve, you can start articulating that into a format that design agencies like ours can understand.
We typically ask things like:
- what is the long-term goal?
- how can we measure it?
- who needs to be in the team?
- what do we need to learn first?
In terms of time and cost, that really depends on the best method for solving your problem.
Start right by getting the brief right
The key thing about thinking of starting a project is to just get on with it. Taking weeks writing a multi-page brief with very little specificity in it helps no one.
Inviting experts in to discuss particular challenges to help understand what you want to achieve — that’s where the magic happens.
