Wednesday, 14 May 2014

College Work - Working to a Brief

Informal
An informal brief is often a undocumented verbal contract between two or more people. an advantage of an informal brief is that it can contain more information than a formal brief, as it is vocally explained to the contractee, although a informal brief can often be misinterpreted by the contractee and deadlines can be unclear.

Formal
A formal brief is often a written contract in which is given to the contractee, the instructions are often unclear to some people as it only gives the bare minimum specifications on how to make the required product. An advantage to a formal brief is that it leaves the project open to negotiation between the both parties. A disadvantage is that the person who created the brief can think they included enough information within the brief required to make the product, but when passed to the contractee can be often confusing and hard for the contractee to produce the end project.

Contractual
A contractual brief is a brief in which is given to a specific individual or company. The brief contains specific guidelines and a specific deadline in which the contractee must follow. The main advantage of having a contractual brief is that the contractee will have very specific guidelines in order to achieve the final result. A disadvantage of a contractual brief is that if the brief is unclear in certain areas the contractee could end up producing a product unsatisfactory to the contractor.

Collaborative
A collaborative brief is one in which is given to two or more contractees, after receiving the brief the companies will then work together to produce the required product. If a conflict of ideas should arise a negotiated brief can be put in place in order to resolve the issues.

Tendered
A tendered brief is one in which the brief will not be finalised until the company has came up with a final product in order to create, many products will be created and pitched to the company and they will then tender the brief to that specific product. An advantage of a tendered brief is that a better quality product can be created as the company can choose the best idea from the variety of the suggestions. A disadvantage to this type of brief is that it could be hard to find the correct contractee for the pitched project, meaning the company proposing the idea could be set back in development time on their product.

Commissioned
A commissioned brief is a brief in which the company will contract (or commission) an external company to produce the required product in their place. The commissioned company will be shared within the royalties for the product. The brief is not negotiated between the company and the client, however it is negotiated between the two contractees. An advantage is that the main contractee will have to next to no work, after passing it onto the commissioned company. A disadvantage is that because the brief is not negotiated with the contractor the product can be produced to an insufficient standard.

Consultation
Consultation is a key issue when working to a brief, for example if you have an issue with a specific part of the brief it is best to consult the contractor rather than assuming what they meant and continuing to do what you think they meant, as this could cause a problem with the end product.

Discretion
Discretion is always good to take into consideration, for example you could ask your contractor if things within the brief to better suit your development cycle. You could also ask if the budget is open for discussion as this can allow you to more easily produce the project.

Constraints
A constraint could be if a primarily English speaking company contracted a company that primarily spoke Chinese there would be a lot of problems with making the project as the contracted company would have difficulty understanding the English brief. Copyright is also an issue as the product being created could violate the copyright of another product.

Budget
There are many issues with budgeting, mainly dependant upon the finance source. Some examples of finance income are Crowdfunding and Independant. Some examples of problems with these funding types are with crowdfunding, and you put your project on a website like kickstarter, your project may not reach the required goal the project will get no money. Independant however is much harder to fund in general as it is often funded by a single person and as such they will be capped a specific budget and will very rarely go higher than that budget.

Conditions
If when making the project a issue arises where you need to add a new component within the brief it can be discussed with the contractor and then possibly added into the development cycle. Making sure regulations haven't changed is important as you need to make sure you are using the correct tools the contractor want you to, instead of making something in a way they don't want you to.

Plan (time)
Planning the brief is the main part within making a brief as it must be SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Time based). The brief must be SMART as otherwise the product may not be specific enough for the contractee or achievable within the given time limit. Another part of planning is making sure that the workload is evenly distributed between the start time and the deadline, this is the contractees job to do this and it will reduce strain upon them meaning they can get the entire project done before the deadline, a good idea would be to plan to produce the project a week or two earlier than the deadline and then polish up the project within those final two weeks. Planning the fees for the project is also vital to the planning process, as midway through making a project if you run out of money to produce the required project you can end up with a incomplete or a scrapped project.

Bibliography

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