Audit Your Own Project Brief

Think of a real project you are working on now — or one that recently went wrong. You will test its brief against SMART and KISS, find where it breaks, and rewrite the one line that matters most.

Name the project

Write the project's name and, in one sentence, what it is supposed to deliver by when.

SMART check

Mark which of the five SMART criteria your current brief satisfies. Be honest — a partial tick counts as a miss.

Specific · Measurable · Achievable · Relevant · Time-bound

KISS check

Sort every current deliverable into two zones: things the client explicitly asked for, and things the team added.

Client asked for

Team added

Where does it break?

Look at steps 2 and 3. Which single failure — a missing SMART element or an out-of-scope deliverable — is causing the most risk right now? Name it and commit to one answer.

Why is it still there?

Go back to your answer in step 4. Write the real reason this gap or extra feature survived the briefing stage — habit, politics, vagueness, or something else.

Rewrite the objective

Write a new one-sentence objective for your project that passes every SMART criterion and excludes everything from the right-hand zone in step 3. Read it back — would a new team member know exactly what to build and when to stop?

The one word this project is missing

If you could add one word to your team's working culture to prevent the problem you found in step 4 — a word that would live on a Post-it above every desk — what would it be? Write it large, then write one line explaining why that word, and not another.

Why that word?

Discuss Share your rewritten objective from step 6 with a partner — can they find a gap you missed?

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