As the project brief should be clear and concise it usually includes headings and lists. It is a summary record of the agreements on which the project is based. A checklist of the headings that you will need is in Example 4.3.
Example 4.3
Checklist for drafting a project brief Project title.
Name of sponsor or other contact responsible for project approval.
Locations – addresses of sponsor, project location, contact addresses.
Name of person managing the project and contact details.
Date of agreement of project brief.
Date of project start and finish.
Background to the project and purpose with goals outlined.
Key objectives with quality and success criteria.
Details of how achievement of these will bring benefits to the spon- soring organization.
Scope of the project and any specific boundaries.
Constraints.
Assumptions.
Timescale of the project.
Deliverables and target dates (milestones).
Estimated costs.
Resourcing arrangements.
Reporting and monitoring arrangements.
Decision making arrangements – level of authority and accountability held by manager of project and arrangements for any necessary rene- gotiation.
Communications arrangements.
Signature of sponsor with date, title and role or authority
In a complex project there might be previous documents outlining initial decisions. These can be referred to rather than repeated in the project brief and may be added as appendices. There may be documents about the 56 Managing projects in human resources
background to the project and the justification for expenditure. Key objectives need to be put into the project brief but detailed objectives are usually iden- tified later when the project plan is developed. The criteria for success are important as they help to check that you all have a similar picture of what success will mean. These are also the measures that will be used to check whether the project achieved its objectives.
The project brief will indicate some of the scheduling concerns in the project. The date for completion will have been identified along with the key deliverables and when they will be handed over. Most projects also agree a schedule for reviewing progress, either monthly or quarterly, depending on the length of the project. The things that should have been achieved at each of these review stages are usually called ‘milestones’, and these are the focus for each review period. The deliverables are the things that will be handed over or reported on at each of these review periods. For example, the full project might involve training 100 people to use new equipment within a year, but you might agree to report on progress quarterly and set targets of training 25 people in each quarter. Thus your milestones would be set as 25 trained staff each quarter. At the monitoring and review meetings you would then report on whether you had achieved this, and if there had been any slippage, how this would be recovered before the next deadline. You would also report on whether achieving the training had cost time, effort and money as estimated – whether the project was running within its budget.
It is helpful to agree the main channels of communication at this stage, whether they are detailed in the project brief or not. You need to know how to contact the key people, including the sponsor or the sponsor’s delegated representative. You also need to know how they prefer to be contacted. There will be information to communicate about the progress of the project, and regular progress reports can be sent to all those who should be kept informed.
Arrangements for doing this can be agreed at the project brief stage along with any other reporting arrangements. A practical arrangement is to agree that decisions about any changes to the schedule or the resourcing can be made and signed off by the sponsor or the sponsor’s representative at review meetings. You will also want to agree how to communicate if there is an urgent issue that needs immediate attention.
You might think that writing a project brief to this level of detail takes up time better spent on the project itself – but the project brief is crucial as a tool for effective management of the project. Without a brief of this type a project could progress with many successful elements, but without the overall direc- tion and control that would ensure that it achieved its purpose. The project brief is about establishing and recording agreement about the purpose, cost and timing of the project. Successful projects are all about hitting the agreed targets on time and within the agreed budget. You should now be able to Defining the project 57
prepare a project brief so that agreement can be obtained with the project sponsor. This document will provide a blueprint for the planning phase of the project.
58 Managing projects in human resources
5
Managing risk
Events rarely happen in the way we expect them to, so there will always be risks associated with a project. As a project takes place in a wider environ- ment, there are the risks normally associated with day-to-day work in that setting, including health and safety risks, for example. There are also risks to the project that exist only because the project exists, for example, the risk that the project will not achieve its objectives. In this chapter we consider how to identify areas of risk and what can be done to reduce the likelihood of damage to the project.