Manage your code project

In the first chapter, you learned about the five important parts of a project brief:

• Summary

• Stakeholders

• Goals

• Timeline

• Budget

Of course, you can have more sections if your project requires it! These five are almost always important for any project though, so we'll cover them first.

Let's begin with the sections that broadly cover the project: summary, stakeholders, and goals.

Course example

As a practical example throughout this course, we'll pretend you work on a development team within a (fictional) company called Dough. This startup delivers high-quality ingredients and curated recipes for you to bake your own bagels, bread, and cake from scratch. No more of that muffin-mix-in-a-box nonsense!

Dough allows one-time orders through either its mobile app (iOS or Android) or desktop site. 📱💻

You'll be responsible for adding a subscription feature so people can repeatedly order their favorite ingredient sets (mine would be whole wheat everything bagels, I'm just saying...)

Summary

Let's get started on this project brief for the Dough subscription service mentioned above! Your project brief's summary should be a place anyone can look to get a quick idea of your project without reading the whole brief. A paragraph (or two, maximum!) is sufficient.

Whether you're working on a large or small project, you'll want to give people a small tidbit so they can understand what's going on!

How would you write a summary for your subscription project at Dough? 🤔  Take a few minutes and jot down a few sentences before checking out the example at the bottom of the page.

Stakeholders

Stakeholders are people directly involved in the project. You can also call them participants. This could be:

• developers or designers involved in building it;

• product managers or executives who requested it;

• marketers required for selling it;

• third-party collaborators.

In the case of the Dough subscription service, you'll be working alongside several people. You'll be in close proximity with:

• Karin, the company's iOS developer, and Miles, the company's Android developer, to ensure that your functionality works on all mobile apps

• Phil, your CFO, to ensure correct pricing of the new subscriptions

• Amin, the lead designer, to furnish you great-looking mockups for the feature

Can you imagine other departments or collaborators being involved? To come up with a project's list of collaborators, think both vertically (management) and horizontally (team members).

Goals

Goals are the guiding light for your project. A project has many goals, but you'll only add the most important and the most measurable to your project brief.

Goals in your project brief should be specific, measurable, and agreed-upon. For example, if your project involved building an iPhone app, "Build an app" would be a bad goal. A much better goal would be "Release a rigorously-tested iOS application that allows users to access all major functionalities (x, y, and z) of the desktop site."

Where does this put us for the beginning of our Dough project brief? Start an initial draft!