If you’d like to build a web application, you definitely need to deliver a web app 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 web app 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 web app 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
Include a summary of the project or type of work in your web app brief, explaining why it is necessary. For instance, explain that a web application is needed because many of your users work remotely and that having an application that can be accessed from anywhere will make accessing particular resources much simpler. Don’t confuse this part with project requirements – this is something you work out during the discovery phase.
Do you want to create a digital product? Our team is ready to help you to find the optimal solution that will meet your specifications and achieve your business goals.
Get in touch with us3. 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. Don’t make too many assumptions early on, or you will make 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 fulfills 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. They will help you measure the real value of the work once you complete it. 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. Once you have published your app, decide what to do next
Don’t forget that your web app 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!).
We are an award-winning web development agency with great 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.
