A how-to guide for writing a project brief
Effectively the starting point of your project, the project brief provides key stakeholders with the bare bones of your project and intentions in order to invite suggestions and questions.
What’s more, a project brief, much like a business case, can be used as a powerful aid to help you pitch your project to senior leadership due to the fact it provides, not only an overview of the project, but also the ultimate goals of that project; connecting to the organisation’s overall objectives.
As such, writing a strong and coherent project brief is imperative to the ultimate success of your project. To help you, here we’ll go through how to write a project brief.
How to write a project brief
When writing a project brief, the following elements will need to be included in your project brief –
Begin with a project summary: the project summary should ‘kick off’ this all-important document, using just a few clear and effective sentences to set out the scope and expectations of your project. The project summary is a place to explore the ‘why’ of your project – what challenges or weaknesses does your project directly tackle and, therefore, why is it important?
Detail project intent: What is the overall goal of your project and what problem(s) will it solve? The project intent comes next and acts as the detail of the end goal – think of the project intent as the project’s mission statement.
Set out key deliverables: results and deliverables are key to PMO reporting and maintaining stakeholder relationships and, as such, setting out your key deliverables in the project brief is crucial to stakeholder buy-in and a successful project launch; using this section to link project objectives and deliverables to showcase how each step of the process.
Define how success will be measured: whether daily, weekly, bi-weekly or monthly, you’ll need to report project progress to key stakeholders and senior leaders so, ideftifying and defining how success will be measured – i.e. what metrics you intend to track throughout the project – is another key element of your project brief.
Outline the project timeline: unless your project is likely to run indefinitely, creating a project timeline will help key stakeholders better understand each phase of the project, the work and tasks involved and how long everything is going to take – even if, at this time, the timeline is simply a guide or estimate.
In summary, the project brief is important to early stakeholder understanding and ultimate buy-in, and the more top line information you can provide around your project and how it will be managed, the more successful and well-received your project brief will be – setting you out on the right path for a very successful project!
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