How can you create an effective brief for a client portal project? Invessed provide helpful advice in this blog.
Key points
- Briefs are useful to create shared understanding between management, stakeholders, and developers
- Start with the ambition, your vision on how technology can connect customer needs and business objectives
- Be sure to detail the challenges, e.g. commercial pressures, data integrations, compliance, or security requirements
- Less is more: Invessed use a simple questionnaire to determine scope, as our experience will fill in the gaps
Every project needs a brief
Any IT Project needs a project brief to outline the specifications for the project and keep it on track, and client portal projects for asset and wealth management companies are no exception.
Project briefs can help to create a shared understanding between different stakeholders in an organisation; a verbal presentation outlining the key aims of a product is useful but quickly forgotten, whereas a written brief that clearly outlines what is needed, can ensure that management, stakeholders and developers are all on the same page throughout the development process.
A brief creates a shared understanding between different stakeholders.
Where do I begin?
When starting a project brief for a client portal solution, the best place to start is with your overall aims and ambition for the project; what customer needs can the tool fulfil, and how do these fit in with your overall business objectives and processes? The important thing to remember is that these aims need to be practical and realistic – a brief isn’t the place for blue-sky thinking and unrealistic expectations.
To ensure that the brief is a useful resource, it’s important to also outline the challenges that could have an impact on your client portal development and implementation project. Perhaps there are commercial pressures on the business that could impact your decision making? Perhaps there are specific data integrations or security requirements that are essential and add a level of complexity to your project? It could be an issue of compliance – whatever the challenge, ensure that it is incorporated into the brief
What do you want to achieve?
One of the most important pieces of information to share in a brief is what your ambitions are – both for the business and for the client portal. The ambitions that you have for your client portal and also for your organisation as a whole can help your stakeholders – and us – understand what exactly you want to achieve so that we understand the direction of your business.
Remember to include your ambition - for the business and how the client portal fits in this vision
Last but not least, try to keep your brief just that: brief. The ideas should be clear yet concise and they should coherently describe the context, goals and potential obstacles in your project so that they are understood by all parties involved.
From brief to proposal, in one simple step
Once you’ve developed your project brief, we’ve got a simple questionnaire that allows us to create a proposal for you – taking your brief from concept to reality. This helps us to determine the scope of your plan, as per your brief, and allows us to fill in any gaps in your brief that we can see as a result of our knowledge, understanding and experience of numerous successful client portal projects.
Please get in touch if you’d like to find out more about Invessed’s client portal solution.
