Create a Business-Focused Client Brief

Plan Your Sprints and Deliver on Time

Agile documentation, like agile development, is comprised of sprints, which are short documentation cycles in which a single objective is usually the deliverable for that sprint. In the chapter video, I proposed that the most difficult part of an agile documentation process is planning the first sprint. Let's revisit the questions I suggested.

1. What will the objective be? 

2. Who will be involved? 

3. What will the deliverable look like? 

There are other questions you’ll need to ask, but let’s start with these first. If you’re going to break your documentation up by sprints, then you need to identify an objective for each one. The objective is also known as the sprint goal and refers to what will be delivered during the sprint. If you know all of the pieces of documentation you need, you may be able to plan all of your sprints at once. However, if the project is still fluid, you may only be able to plan the first sprint. But that’s OK because once the first one is planned, you’ll have a model for the remaining ones.

To plan the first sprint, we need to ask the first question:

Let’s consider your client, Christie. She sent you two emails outlining her project needs, and she expects a proposal from you, that should probably be a client brief. The first documentation sprint should always consist of at least the client brief (your first objective). Without it, there is no project.

The second question to ask is:

Answering this question will help you define the sprint backlog, which is the list of tasks that must be completed during the sprint to achieve the sprint goal.

The outcome of your first sprint is relatively simple to predict; that is, you’ll produce an effective client brief. However, you may want to consider how it will be shared with your client. Some may simply want the document sent to them for review. Others may want it presented to them in another format. In that case, your deliverable could include the documentation as well as a translation of the data within a slide deck presented via a teleconference, board meeting, etc.

If you have enough information about the stakeholders for a project, then the stakeholder management plan may be of equal importance to the beginning of the project and should be included in that first sprint as well. Let’s consider Christie’s project. Her emails didn't mention anything about other stakeholders, so the only identifiable one at this point would be Christie herself. So, until you know more, the SMP isn’t a top priority.

The third question to ask is:

The answer to this question depends on the previous two. This is where you identify the necessary resources to perform the tasks outlined in the sprint backlog to meet the objective.

I’d like to add three additional questions to your sprint planning that weren’t included in the video. They will help you plan your sprints, so you can efficiently complete your documentation.

Answering this question identifies the target audience for the deliverable.

This tells you if other sprints should be completed first. No one likes to sit around twiddling their thumbs while they wait for someone else to finish a job. That’s a waste of time and money. If you can identify any prerequisite documentation for each deliverable/sprint, then you can establish the order in which the documentation should be written.

This last question sets the deadline for the sprint. Unlike an overall project deadline, which is difficult to gauge, a sprint deadline may be as little as a few weeks away. Sprint deadlines are short-term milestones for the project and help keep it moving forward at an efficient pace.

Planning your documentation sprints doesn’t have to be difficult, but it does need to be thorough. Answering these questions will go a long way toward helping you plan an efficient and effective documentation process.

How About a Little Practice?

Use this excellent client brief sample from the University of Edinburgh for inspiration as you complete the exercise for this section.

In Part 2, you identified a list of business requirements and constraints for the project described in Christie’s emails. You already know that your first sprint in the documentation process for this project should result in a completed effective client brief. You don’t need to plan too much for this, so you might as well get started on the writing process. Using the information in this chapter, along with what you learned in Part 2 about structuring your client brief, gathering requirements, and identifying constraints, construct a first draft of the client brief that you might present to Christie. Although not required, you may want to follow the structure outlined in Part 2, Chapter 1, to keep your document well-organized.

Let’s Recap!

In this chapter, you learned how to plan an agile documentation sprint. The following questions help in sprint planning:

1. What will the objective be? 

2. What will the deliverable look like?

3. Who will be involved? 

4. Who needs the deliverable? 

5. Is it dependent on any other deliverables?

6. When is it needed?

In the next chapter, we’ll look at scope creep and how to manage it in your projects.