In this issue

What's in a brief

The brief

I don’t know about you, but we see a wide variety of briefs from prospective clients, many of which have “disaster waiting to happen” written all over them.  Why?  Because the project is challenging technically and yet the brief is so sketchy and ambiguous that different people will read it differently and in effect bid for different projects.  

If the brief is a page and a half of A4 mainly asking for “a clean design and easy-to-use navigation”, comparing the bids is going to be comparing apples and pears – and what is finally delivered may have only a vague resemblance to what was wanted.  If you have never seen the swing cartoon – click here.

Can you defend yourself against this?  Probably not totally, but you can minimise the risk by having a checklist in your mind of what the ideal brief should contain and then work with the prospect to fill in the gaps.  At least everyone will understand what you are bidding for, and there is a remote chance that the prospect will start wondering what assumptions the other bidders are making.

My checklist

So in the hope that this will be helpful, here is a checklist of what a brief for a technology project should contain, in my opinion and those of experts I have checked with. 

1. Background / scope
   1. Project
      This is an overview of what the project will entail and the background to the project.
   2. Company
      Information about the company, its size, location, existing branding, overall marketing strategy. 
2. Requirements
   1. Objectives
      Why are we developing this web site.  This is the most important section and more on this later.
   2. Intended Audience
      A description of the audience for the site. Is it specialist business to business or a consumer audience?
   3. Specific functions
      There may be functions that are specified in detail.  In this case this section may appear as an appendix or even a separate document called something like a Functional Specification.  
   4. Content and structure
      Any ideas about content, a high level site map if the concept has been developed that far.  
   5. Technical Requirements
      Technical requirements may include adherence to standards, accessibility, or hosting needs. 
   6. Similar Websites
      Are there any examples of sites that appeal to the client or capture the essence of what you wish to achieve?  
   7. Branding Requirements
      If there are any branding guidelines that must be met, include or refer to any documentation. 
3. Response
   1. Budget and Time Requirements
      No-one is going to tell you their budget.  But they may indicate that they are looking for a top-flight solution or a budget solution.  They may also indicate their timescale requirements. 
   2. Format of the response
      This section tells you how they want the proposal structured and presented.  Ignore this at your peril.
4. Bidding process
   1. Evaluation procedure
      How the bids will be evaluated and any criteria that will be used.  
   2. Administration
      Who the proposal should be sent to, procedure for dealing with queries and time plan for the bidding process.  
   3. Confidentiality: Any confidentiality requirement.
   4. Timeline
5. Contract terms
   They may present their terms or ask for yours.
    

Requirements – the key section

 
The requirements section is your key to getting the business and running a successful project (remember the swing cartoon).  IT projects rarely go wrong because the software doesn’t work.  Projects go wrong because the software does the wrong thing.  So make sure you know what the web site is for before you even think about preparing a response. 

The client is looking for certain business benefits from the site. It may be:

• New customers
• Wider market
• Direct sales
• Better press coverage
• Reduced customer support calls
  or
• "I just want one"

The customer will not give you the business unless you can convince him/her that you are capable of delivering these benefits.  You don’t stand a chance unless you know what they are.

The most common problem you will come up against is that your prospective client hasn’t identified and written down the objectives of the project. If you can find out and present these in your proposal then you have an edge.  In my experience at Logica, the most common reason people gave us for awarding the contract to us was that ‘You guys understood what we needed”.

Filling the gaps

So, a page and a half of A4 full of meaningless padding arrives at you door.  What do you do?

You might find it useful to go through the list, consulting the customer where necessary.  Ideally get your technical people (e.g. us) involved at this stage.  Fill out the gaps, either with their input or making assumptions, then play it all back in the proposal.

Often in this kind of pre-proposal contact the customer will ask for a ball park cost.  "Of course"  (they say with a look of cherub-like innocence) "we won't hold you to it".  It is tempting to blurt something out, but watever you do DON’T GIVE THEM ANY BUDGET FIGURES because they will ALWAYS hold you to it. 

Conclusion

I hope this is a useful checklist.  I certainly found it a useful exercise to put it together. 

Next month I will talk about what goes into the proposal.  A proposal has two jobs to do, (1) to get you the job and (2) to make sure you don't lose your shirt on it.  You don't need me to tell you about number 1, but number 2 sometimes gets lost.  Its all down to the requirements section again.

IE7 is here - do some testing

If you use a Mac you may not be aware that every PC in the world is being updated with a new version of Internet Explorer. Some corporates are blocking it, but a very high percentage of users are upgrading. 

IE7 is quite a lot different to IE6.  We have already had to upgrade a customer's site where the third-party Javascript that drives the drop-down menus doesn't work at all.     So you might want to think about re-testing your client's sites and be ready to be proactive if they have any problems.

News from the web

Getting high in search engine results - higher and higher
The holy grail of search engine optimisation was to get your site in the top ten results for important key phrases.  Now we laugh at top ten - you need top five.  Microsoft released the results of an eye-tracking survey that the two factors are: 1. Getting in the top 5 and 2. snippet length should be longer. 

MySpace sued
Now that MySpace have those deep News Corp pockets, they are getting sued by parents whose underage children were abused by people they met on the site.

Google's checkout not to hot
A recent survey of customers rated Google's checkout service below PayPal. 
  
Would you download your operating system?
Microsoft is planning to deliver the new version of Windows (Vista) over the Internet as a download.  Me, I don't want to be the first kid on my block with this software.  I will be letting it bed in first.

TV on the Internet
I have been really impressed by the quality of IPTV (TV Over the Internet) recently. Forget the postage-stamp sized blurry image - think full-wide-screen broadcast-quality TV with very quick start-up. There are some very interesting business models in this area and I will be devoting a future issue of web driven to this subject.  In the meantime, the founders of Skype are developing a new service called Joost.

The way this is reported by the way is pretty appalling. 
"Skype Founders Unveil YouTube Killer"  - er no I don't think this is going to showing my holiday videos.
"Skype founders bring free television to the internet"  - not exactly there are other well established services and potentially a lot of competition.  Check out www.narrowstep.com
The best report I could find was at The Register.  But I still don't really know what it is.  I have signed up for the beta program - more on this later.

Potentially much more significant than this is the news that Sony is releasing an Internet-ready TV set-top box.  So are Apple, Microsoft and Sling media. 

In fact Microsoft is showing off a gaming machine / computer / set-top box.

Inevitably someone is sueing (yawwwnnn...)

You don't need a telescope to discover new worlds
You just need an internet connection. You can be one of hundreds sifting through data made available on-line to find that hidden result.

How do you make money out of user-generated content?
A dilemma for YouTube and MySpace.  They asked the same about search engines - until someone invented Pay Per Click. 

AOL is bidding $900m for TradeDoubler
We have looked at TradeDoubler in the past, and it is an interesting concept but I am agnostic about it. 

Got a question - someone wants to answer.
Amazon's new Askville service allows users to ask a question and other users to answer.    At the same time a busines service LinkedIn is doing the same for its members.    By the way if you are not a member of LinkedIn, its a great way of organising your people network.

It's not just young men that are tech savvy
In a survey if women 40-49 were given $500, 43% would spend it on hi-tech devices.