The brief before the deliverable

The quality of a deliverable is decided before the first line. A vague request, “make a presentation on the project”, produces a generic document that then has to be reworked. A five-line brief produces a first draft that is genuinely useful.

• The audience: who will read or listen, and what they already know.
• The goal: what the reader must understand, decide or do afterwards.
• The format: document, presentation, spreadsheet, and its length.
• The sources: the files that are authoritative.
• The constraints: the tone, the date, what to avoid.

For a deliverable longer than a few paragraphs, ask for the outline first. Learnya builds the outline of a presentation before writing its slides anyway, and you can stop it there to correct it. Moving a part in an outline takes ten seconds. Moving it in a written document takes ten minutes.