Specifications

Your refined brief needs to

• include specifications
• show evidence of consultation with stakeholders
• show the results of your key factor research and prioritisation.

A SPECIFICATION is measurable and describes what the solution will be, or look like, or behave, or do. Each key factor should be investigated and researched to develop a specification.

When you have printed your refined brief, you could hand-write on the page where each specification came from.

Here is an example:

My husband and I are planning a 90th birthday party for my father-in-law. As part of the event, we will have a slideshow of photos of Les's life. Key factors for the slideshow include:

• content
• length
• presentation style

Key factor research tells us that "three minutes is a long stretch for time-based media. The infomercials you see on late-night TV are often three minutes long, and they feel repetitive and endless" (quoted fromMediapedia by Kit Laybourne).

This suggests an attribute: the presentation should be short.

This then becomes a specification: the presentation should be three minutes long.

Legal and Ethical Issues

In any technology project you need to consider legal and ethical issues.
Legal issues are to do with the law.
Ethical issues are to do with right and wrong.
Ethical issues are things that people argue passionately about.
Actions can be legal but not ethical.
Actions can also be - defended as - ethical but not legal.
Sometimes what is legal is also open to argument.
An interesting recent example from the media is the case of the Waihopai Spy Base trial, where the peace protestors claimed that what they did was to prevent suffering and was therefore not illegal.

You MUST include legal and ethical issues somewhere in your project - either your key factors or your codes of practice would be sensible. And you will need to talk about these issue again in yuor evaluation.

Writing your Refined Brief

To write your refined brief you need to:

1. Have evidence of consultation of stakeholders to help you
2. Write one (or more) specification for each of your key factors
3. Make sure each specification is measurable.

Key Factors

Once you have chosen your issue you need to start working on key factors for a successful solution.
Previous posts on this blog give some information.
You might also like to look at this poster which lists a set of key factors that may help you.
Key factors may be added to as the consultation process progresses.
What you need to do with them is

• list them
• explain their implications
• prioritise them
• explain their priorities
• discuss the interactions between them
• use them to write specifications for your refined brief

Key Factors and Implications

Key factors are the "factors which have a bearing on the outcome of your project" (Camilla Reith). Another explanation is that they are "elements of a project considered more important than others". I suggest you start by brainstorming all the thigns that you can think of that affect you and your project. If you have more than seven, then group them into related ideas and give each a heading.

In the My Project Management Tools folder in iNet you will find a file called Key Factors.

• In the first column, list your key factors (the headings if you had to group your factors)
• In the next column, explain what this key factor means for your project - what you have to DO or THINK ABOUT.
• In the third column, put a number that shows the priority for each key factor, with 1 being the mots important.
• In the last column, explain why you have given this priority number to this key factor.

Key Factor Research

When you have chosen your key factors, you need to researach them. You may not need to research every key factor, and each key factor may need researching in different ways.
So, you should take one key factor at a time, ask yourself the following questions, and record the answers - probably in a Word document.

1. What information do I already have about this key factor?
2. What questions do I have about this key factor?
3. Where can I get answers to these questions?
4. What are the answers to these questions?
5. Are there any more questions about this key factor? If so, go back to Step 3!

Key factor interactions

When you have identified your key factors, you need to consider how each key factor affects each other one. You can do this by

1. Finding the Key Factor Interactions file in iNet > ICT > Mr Molyneux > My Project Management Tools.



2. Copying and pasting your key factors down the side of the table.



3. Copying and pasting your key factors across the top of the table.



4. Filling in the boxes for half of the table - see example above.