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This article provides guidance on what a Project Brief is, the value it can provide and some of the core concepts to include in a Project Brief. The concepts covered in this article are universally relevant to any type of project or initiative. They are also extremely relevant when implementing inriver into an organisation.
Do I need a Project Brief?
Probably! If you are doing a piece of work, that has a very specific aim, involves several people, that has any level of complexity and you need to keep the work coordinated from the start to achieve a specific goal, the answer is “Yes”.
What value does a Project Brief add?
A Project Brief is like telling the team… “we’re going to see a show in New York at the Gershwin Theatre, it’s a great show because it will make us all laugh. We are going on this plane that leaves on this date at this time from this airport and it will cost us $2000 each and include your flights, hotels, and meals. It will not include any money to go shopping”.
It gives all the key information, so that you can be confident when stood at the airport departure gate, everyone is there with what they need and looking forward to the show.
Without the Project Brief, everyone could end up in different cities, different theatres on different days and expect all their shopping to be paid for.
Project Briefs set the team up for success.
What is the purpose of the Project Brief?
You can google “Project Briefs” and you will get a wide range of options with lots of different formats and styles, yet all of these options have one thing in common, the Project Brief is a communication document.
The Project Brief is the one place to go to understand the project simply and is used by different groups with different needs.
- Decision makers - why should we invest time and resources into doing this work, what they are being promised and what are the risks.
- Project team - why we are doing it, what is and is not included and what outcomes it must achieve.
- Others - useful way to understand what is happening quickly.
In many ways it is an internal contract, setting a clear expectation of what needs to be delivered by the Project team to achieve success.
The Project Brief can also act as a reality check for the project, the information it contains helps to understand the answers to the big questions.
- Have we got a clear direction to head in, with enough understanding of it?
- Will the outcomes be achieved with the activity and work we are planning?
- How do we need to set-up the project to achieve this?
- What do we put in place to overcome the challenges we may encounter on the journey?
It is not the only document needed for a project and other documents can have a lot more detail for the elements included in the brief.
What to include in a Project Brief?
Normally project teams are given a particular format that their organization likes to use and these can be “lite” or “detailed” depending on the organizations priorities.
For a Project Brief to fulfil its primary communication goals, the Project Brief needs to contain not only the details about the why, but also a high level view of the what, how and who.
The Project Brief is used in conjunction with the benefit case and the initial project plans to give a robust level of understanding of the project before it starts.
Below are the recommended sections:
Recommended Sections
| Section | What is included |
| Strategic fit | Every organisation has a destination it is trying to reach and demonstrating that this project takes the organization in that direction is very valuable. It will highlight how it contributes to the goal or if it is a “side” initiative, important, but not directly related to the overall goal being achieved. |
| Background | The “What, so what, now what” of why this project is being considered. It helps the reader to understand where the project fits, showing the problem it will fix or the opportunity it will exploit. |
| Hypothesis (Optional) |
Most change is implementing something new, which is unproven. Using a hypothesis to state what we expect to happen as a result of the project, allows it to be sense checked and understand if this project is likely to move the success criteria by the required amount |
| Primary success measures | By investing in this project, the leaders want to see a change, the Primary success measures show how this change will be visible once the project has completed. The project team can use these measures to be laser focused on the decisions made during the project, “will this approach achieve the success measures? Do we need to do more, or less?” There can often be hard (Measurable) and soft (not measurable) measures, the Primary success measures should all be measurable – but this is not always easy to do and sometimes a project must deliver the ability to measure these metrics. |
| Scope |
Critical to the success of the project is to know the boundaries of it, where do the team operate and where do they stop. There are two important notes with Scope 2) Scope can be change as the project progresses, but this must be done in a controlled way so the impact of any changes are understood before accepted. |
| Scope assumptions & constraints |
All projects have to make assumptions on how they will get to the outcomes they are tasked to deliver. Making these visible helps decision makers to sense check the resources needed are available. Having an agreed set of assumptions also supports the Project team, as it allows the project lead to get a commitment for the resource that are required. |
| Stakeholders |
No team is a silo and other departments and their leaders may be needed to assess or respond to any impacts the project may deliver. Stakeholders need to be onboarded and agree to this change before the project starts, otherwise they might not support the vital elements required and the overall goal cannot be reached. |
| Project structure & team | Getting a project from A to B requires a team set-up in specific roles to support on that journey. Defining how that team will be structured and who is in each position is vital for coordinated team work and clarity. Depending on the methodology, this could be the members of the different Sprint teams or the workstreams that are taking place. The Project structure will also make it clear of who is accountable for the work, who is doing it, normally defined as a RACI, but a MACIP can make it more understandable for the team (who is Managing, who has Actions, who to Consult, who to Inform, who is Project manging). |
| Risk Assessment | Before committing to the decision makers you can make this change happen, are there any problems challenges that we will face and what would be the impact? Doing a risk assessment gives a sense of what could go wrong and what would should be done about it, it helps to guess at what the surprises are and the impact they could have. Decision makers should base their decision on everything going to plan, but also some of the surprises appearing and potentially impacting the project e.g. “There is a risk that we need to make changes in X system as well, that could be $10k to $20k”. Making it clear what the potential other impacts on Time, cost, Scope, give the decision makers the full picture, not the just the “happy path” view. |
| Investment case |
Supporting document: Summary of the benefits versus the cost of delivering the change. |
| Project plan |
Supporting document: Summary of the expected activity to deliver the change, in particular the duration as this normally has a significant impact on the cost. |
Is a Project Brief all you need for a Project?
Absolutely not, Project Briefs are focused on defining what the project will deliver and a high-level view of how it be will deliver. both are needed for a Project Brief to be signed-off with confidence.
As part of the overall Project Management of the Project, other documents that are commonly used are listed below, but will depend upon the level of control the organization wants to use, and the scale of the investment involved.
There will be different views on what best practice is for project management, the list below is a suggestion of other elements to manage that can be researched online.
- Investment case – to support the Primary success measures and investment level
- Governance – details of how who owns each element and decisions are taken and the coordination of all elements of the project
- High level plan – A plan on a page of the End to End forecast for the project to track against
- Project plan – Detailed plan for the current, next and ideally future stages that can be tracked against at a daily/weekly level. This can be shown as a list, Kanban, Gantt chart or other formats.
- Resource plan
- Budget forecast
- RAID – A list of Risks, issues, Actions and Decisions for the Project
- Communication plan
- Stakeholder map
- Change request log
The topic of Project Briefs use cases and how to write them is covered comprehensively on the internet. If you want to research more about this topic you could visit this link which explains how to write a PRINCE2 Project Brief. PRINCE is a project delivery methodology designed by the UK Government to manage large or small projects in a standard way.
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