The Importance of a Good Brief Document or a Request For Proposal
Dragan on 19. Aug '08 5
We are getting more and more really bad—so to say—RFPs containing very little information or no brief or documentation at all. It is catastrophic. You can’t expect getting a precise and fair proposal or a quote if you don’t inform your design firm well about what you need.
The Brief Says a Lot About You
“We need a site designed, nothing fancy—how much will it cost?” is just not going to cut it.
What is a design company going to think about you if you can’t sit down for an hour and put together a decent brief document? How is the development process going to be then? I’m telling you – to us designers and project managers it certainly sets off some red lights flashing as it is a first sign that you are perhaps not devoted enough to your project and that it might get bumpy down the road. We understand that people are busy, but it’s really not an excuse. Also, briefs with little information require large padding in estimates inflating your quote due to many unknown variables.
One other thing a detailed brief says about the client is that things are well thought through. Someone invested time and effort into research and putting this thing together, and probably have a solid image inside their head of what they want.
What a good Brief Must Contain
A good brief at a bare minimum must include these essential items:
- Information about the client, person or a company requesting the quote
- A concise, short but informational description of the project
- Detailed descriptions of the goals of the project, and the desired features
- List of competitor’s sites
- Desired (or fixed) dates of project start and end dates
- Description of certain resources that are requested to be used in the development, or design requirements (sites we like, etc.)
- Budget
If your brief covers all of these these, or even if it lacks one or two—you’re good.
“We need a site designed, nothing fancy—how much will it cost?” is just not going to cut it. Sorry, but that tells me you are shopping for a Website, and have probably sent an email similar to that one to dozens of agencies and/or freelancers looking for the cheapest bid. Nothing wrong with that, but we prefer to work with people who choose us. We give a personal touch, but we also request that you provide one back. It’s a prerequisite that almost guarantees a good solid relationship, and inevitably a good end product we will all be proud of.
I agree! Without a good RFP, it could take months to gather all the information you need before you even start on a draft! Been there, done that and never again!
Great post!
— Karinne 20. August 2008, 23:09 #
Why don’t you make an effort, give a RFP template for the future clients, and offer this template for download somewhere off your website? It could be helpful to all, useful for the busy clients, useful for you because you will get your data in a format that is best for you.
— possibly useful 26. August 2008, 04:49 #
^ If you visit our temporarily disabled questionnaire form – you’ll see that although it is disabled, we do offer the same questionnaire in txt format.
It will soon be up and running again, we’re just overwhelmed with other matters with higher priorities unfortunately.
— Dragan Babić 26. August 2008, 05:10 #
I saw the questionnaire form and it’s good. However I was thinking of another step further: give an example of a filled-out form, so people know not only what you are interested in, but also in what form you would prefer to have the answer.
You can invent the client requirements, but make sure they are representative of what you would like to see. So, invest an extra hour or two to prepare this, and expect the people to better understand and meet your own requirements. Hope this helped.
— possibly useful 27. August 2008, 07:00 #
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