The quality of a consulting engagement is shaped substantially by the quality of the brief that initiated it. A brief that is vague produces a proposal that has to fill the gaps with assumptions. A brief that is narrowly focused on outputs — “build us a dashboard”, “audit our GA4 setup” — invites a solution that delivers exactly what was asked for while missing the business problem that motivated the request. A brief that describes symptoms without context puts the consultant in the position of diagnosing blind.
Getting more value from external analytics consultants is, in large part, a briefing skill — and it is one that most organisations have not deliberately developed.
What a Weak Brief Typically Contains
Most briefs that underdeliver share several characteristics: they describe what is wanted rather than why it is wanted; they specify the solution rather than the problem; they provide limited context about the business, the audience for the work, or how the output will be used; and they say nothing about what success looks like from the organisation’s perspective. A consultant who receives a brief of this kind is being asked to guess at the most important parts of the engagement.
The Elements of a Brief That Actually Works
The Business Context
What is happening in the business that has made this engagement necessary or timely? What are the strategic priorities that this work is intended to support? A consultant who understands that a reporting project is driven by a board-level commitment to data-driven decision-making will make different choices than one who understands it as a straightforward technical build. The business context changes the interpretation of every other element of the brief.
The Problem, Not the Solution
Briefs that specify the solution — “we need a Looker Studio dashboard” — close off alternatives before they have been considered. A brief that specifies the problem — “our marketing team spends several hours each week pulling data from multiple sources to produce a weekly performance report, and the result is inconsistent and error-prone” — opens the conversation to the full range of approaches that might address it, of which a dashboard may or may not be the most effective.
The Constraints
What is the budget envelope? What is the timeline? What technology are you committed to? What internal resources can be involved? Constraints are not obstacles to good consulting — they are parameters that make a good solution possible. A proposal that does not account for real constraints is not a good proposal; it is an idealised one that will require significant renegotiation once reality intervenes.
The Success Criteria
How will you know, at the end of the engagement, whether it has delivered what was needed? The more specific and observable the success criteria, the more useful they are — both for evaluating the outcome and for aligning expectations at the start. “The team feels more confident with data” is a success criterion; “the marketing team produces weekly performance reports without external support” is a better one.
Digital Analytics Lab works with clients to develop briefs collaboratively before scoping any engagement. If you have a challenge but are not yet sure how to frame it, we offer a structured discovery conversation that helps you articulate the problem, the context, and the criteria for success before any proposal is written. Start that conversation on our Consulting & Training page.
