Steps to create a brief
You want to create a website or an application for your company and you are going to call on an agency, but they ask you for a brief…
But what exactly is a brief?
The brief is an essential document for creating a project. They allow you to gather all the information needed to send to your agency for the successful completion of your project. By creating them with all the stakeholders (logistics, communication, etc.) in your company, you can ensure that you don’t forget anything and that everyone has their say.
Steps to create your brief
A brief can take many different forms, but they bring together essentially the same information: the budget, deadlines and the requirements for your project.
Let’s now look at the specific case of brief for a website.
1. Presentation of your company
This part introduces you, your sector and your competitors. This is where you will indicate what you do and what you have already undertaken in the past.
2. Presentation of your project
What is your project? What do you want to do? How? Who is it for? You will answer several questions to help your service provider understand the scope of your project and what you have already thought about. Of course, what you have written is not set in stone and is open to discussion. Your service provider will also be able to help you refine certain details that you have difficulty answering.
3. Scope of your project
Now that you have presented your project, you will have to go into a little more detail. In the Scope of your project section, you will indicate how you see the realization of your project, if you want specific technical solutions, list the features you expect, the content… and how you see the future of your site, namely if you would like maintenance or not.
This entire section will help your service provider to establish a quote that will correspond to the next section:
4. Budget
As in any project, comes the unfortunate stage of the budget. Answering these questions is a prerequisite, because it will allow your service provider to refine their quote in order to offer you one that suits you, but also to estimate whether what you are asking for fits into your budget.
5. Project monitoring
The penultimate part to read and fill out of a specification, this is the Project monitoring. Here, you can indicate what you want to see from an agency, the terms of exchange as well as the deadlines to be respected. This part also informs you of the role that you and your service provider will each have to play in your collaboration.
6. Deliverables
Although a predefined list of deliverables is predefined for your website project, you can request additional deliverables in this last part (e.g. instructions for using your site)
7. Conclusion
A properly written specification is one of the keys to the success of your project and allows both you and us to refer to it to ensure that nothing has been forgotten. Feel free to take the time needed to build it. We can also assist you in filling in certain parts.
Download your brief template
We have prepared three examples of specifications (website, application and motion design) that you can download here.