Colabmo development course A-P02

Learning objective: Write a measurable outcome without embedding an untested solution.

A useful brief specifies whose need matters, the triggering event, the end condition, quality requirements and the authority to make a decision. “Implement a portal” specifies a mechanism. “Give an eligible customer a usable service account and a confirmed start date” specifies an outcome. Even the latter needs definitions of eligible, usable and confirmed.

Start with a real transaction. Ask the recipient to explain what they could do after successful completion that they could not do before. Then identify other affected parties: the person maintaining the record, the team accepting the work, the control owner and people handling exceptions. A fast front door that transfers ambiguity downstream may make total service worse.

Write a boundary sentence: “From receipt of a complete service request to a communicated, authorized decision and an assigned next action.” Record incomplete requests separately rather than stopping the clock invisibly. Decide how withdrawn and rejected requests are represented. A speed target without a clear denominator invites misleading improvement claims.

Use four classes of measures: customer outcome, elapsed time, quality or risk, and staff effort. For each, record its definition, data source and review period. Choose targets as proposals until the relevant owner accepts them. If the baseline is unknown, plan measurement; do not invent a starting number.

The boundary is also a decision about scope. A team may redesign intake and routing while leaving pricing policy unchanged. It should record an outside dependency if pricing blocks the outcome. It should not silently expand into an enterprise pricing program.

Example: “For standard service requests with all required evidence, reduce time from complete receipt to an authorized disposition. Preserve the existing access-control rules, report missing-information time separately, and measure the proportion of decisions later reversed.” The actual target and baseline remain to be established.

Practice

In pairs, rewrite “replace the approval spreadsheet with AI” as an outcome brief using W1. Define the start and end, one quality measure, one effort measure, three exclusions and the decision owner. Swap briefs; the reviewer circles language that prescribes a solution.

Check your reasoning

Why is “cut average handling time by half” an incomplete brief?