PD-Trak™ Project Brief

The PD-Trak™ Project Brief form captures a summary of the project including a product and project description, objectives, resource requirements, planned stage-gate dates, and a financial justification. This form initially serves as a proposal for the project, then serves to authorize the project, later provides boundary conditions for managing the project and communicating updates, and finally becomes a project management and quality record for indicating successful completion of key project and process milestones. The form is pre-configured to match the stages/phases and gate reviews or milestones with your company’s product development process. Subsidiary forms and worksheets such as the Budget and Schedule and Financial Justification worksheets automatically link information to the Project Brief form to insure that its information is up to date.

The first section contains project descriptive information, identifies the project milestones and stage-gate review dates, and contains a summary of development costs. Once basic information on the project is defined, the first key step is to estimate gate and other milestone dates considering past experience with other similar projects. The resulting phase durations are used in the Budget and Schedule Worksheet as a basis for determining staffing and the development expense estimates (shown in gray).

The second section of the form describes the project in the form of six fundamental questions: What is the target market and need? What is the proposed product? Can We Do It? Can We Win? Is It Worth It? How Will We Do It? Further guidance is provided on completing each of these sections with the instruction icon.

The third or bottom section of the form captures the financial justification, provides key metrics, and includes a signature block for project authorization. The financial data and metrics can be easily customized from a long list of metrics and data produced in other parts of PD-Trak. There is a red light - green light system built into these metrics to indicate to management when a project, product or financial metric is out of bounds, not acceptable, or of concern.

The Project Brief is updated and reviewed throughout the development cycle to assure that the project is still on track and that conditions have not changed that would warrant cancelling the project. The Project Brief is updated prior to each gate review to insure the financial feasibility and business case for the product are still valid. At each gate review, the Project Brief is reviewed, and, if the project is still on track and justified, it is signed. The signed form constitutes both an authorization and a quality record indicating successful completion of a particular stage/phase and a readiness to proceed to the next stage/phase.

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