A value management approach to strategic briefing: An exploratory study

Strategic briefing commences when a client wishes to inform others of his or her needs and desires for change in the organization, through to the ‘decision to build’ stage and completion of the strategic brief. The lack of formal assessment of clients' needs and requirements in the briefing process has been identified as an issue of concern by an international research study into current briefing practice. A methodology that utilizes a value management (VM) approach to systematically identify and represent clients' requirements in the briefing process was successfully developed in this study. This paper describes an application of VM tools in a one-day strategic briefing workshop concerning a residential project. Five VM tools—issue analysis, client value system, timeline, function analysis and REDReSS analysis—were adopted to assist workshop participants in identifying and clarifying clients' requirements for the project. A questionnaire survey and professional observation were conducted to evaluate the performance of the workshop. The potential benefits and limitations of the strategic briefing workshop are also discussed.