If you’d like to build a web application, you definitely need to deliver a brief to the team responsible for bringing your idea to life. A brief is a guiding document that makes or breaks the project. Moreover, it also helps to get a more accurate estimation from a software development agency and serves as an excellent point of the discovery phase. By developing a well-designed brief, the company you hire to build your application can ask informed questions and be more during successful project discovery.
Here are 7 steps to help you write an excellent brief.
1. Add a company overview
In this section, you can simply summarize what your business does. If your organization is very large, you can use the space to outline the particular branch of the business, which is developing the application.
2. Write down the project summary
Your brief need to include a summary of the project or type of work that is required — and also inform why it’s required in the first place. For example, you can write that you need a web application because many of your users work remotely and accessing particular resources will be easier if they have an application that can be accessed from everywhere. Don’t confuse this part with project requirements — this is something you work out during the discovery phase.
3. Included project timeline
It’s critical that your brief offers a high-level summary of the project’s timeline. That way, the software development company tasked with building your app will have a clear idea about your expectations about specific deliverables and phases. But don’t get too detailed because making too many assumptions early on is a mistake.
4. Outline your project’s budget
This section simply describes the budget that you already have in place for this particular project. Be sure to include a budget for one year of post-launch support, maintenance, hosting, and other services. Your project’s budget should cover not only the resources it takes to build your application but also to maintain it for at least one year from launch.
5. Share your business goals
Make sure that the team responsible for realizing your idea knows what business objectives the application should address. This helps to contextualize the development process and better understand how to build an app that fulfils your goals.
6. Find a way to measure the success of your project
Establish Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and success criteria to make your expectations clear right from the start. If you so that, they will help you to measure the real value of the work once it’s completed. Some examples of success criteria and KPIs for development projects are:
- The project is launched by a specific date.
- The project is launched within the budget.
- An average of app downloads per month during the first year.
Essentially, when forming your KPIs, you need to ask yourself about what kind of data you will be excited to report back to your stakeholders. This is the data you need to include in this section.
7. What to do once your app is published
Don’t forget that your brief is never really completed. Be sure to return to and its key points and update them with new information as your project develops. Once you have completed your initial brief, share it with other project stakeholders, your supervisor, digital agency, or your team.
When you get the green light to go ahead with building your application, you need to perform in-depth user research and define your project requirements. Whenever you achieve one of these steps, be sure to relate back to the project’s brief, and verify that all your materials are coherent.
Conclusion
Approaching a software development agency with a brief like that will make the estimation process faster and more accurate (and the job of the development team easier!).
If you have any questions about creating a brief or you would like us to check your brief, feel free to get in touch with us. We have experts on board who have carried out many software development projects based on different briefs and can tell which elements of a brief are essential to ensure a project’s success.
Originally published at https://mobitouch.net.
