First things first: a working brief is one the Planner could act on without asking you a question it shouldn't have to ask. Yours can look very different from this one and still pass all six checks.
The four puzzle briefs — what they would really have produced
| Brief | The flagged lines | What the Planner would have sent back |
|---|---|---|
| Marco | the CHF 90 from memory · "multiply 60 by 90…" | A tidy quote at CHF 5'400 — wrong by CHF 300, because you handed it a number. |
| Sandra | "make it look nice" · the rota and the wine order | A pretty quote plus two half-finished extras — and no way for you to say whether it's done. |
| Tom | the 10% surcharge · "send it to Mr Keller" | An official quote with a policy Rosehill never had, addressed to the wrong party. |
| "Your favourite" | "guess sensibly" | A good quote — with any gap quietly filled with a plausible invention. |
Marco's draft, fixed
Context: Hotel Bellevue called — staff party on Friday 19 September, 60 guests, they want the Winter Feast. Menus, prices and house rules are in the Rosehill Handbook; Bellevue's invoicing quirk is on the Clients page.
Task: Draft the quote as a table I can send: menu line, delivery, total — and the deposit.
Done when: every price matches the handbook, the deposit is calculated and shown, the invoice goes to the hotel (not the organiser), and nothing is promised for a Monday. If anything is missing, flag it — don't guess.
What went: the remembered price (→ a pointer), the arithmetic (→ the agent's job), "make it look nice" (→ a checkable done), the staff rota (→ its own brief, another day).
What should come back
| Winter Feast, 60 × CHF 95 | CHF 5'700.00 |
| Delivery (60 ≥ 25 guests) | free |
| Total | CHF 5'700.00 |
| Deposit, 30% (order above CHF 2'000) | CHF 1'710.00 |
| Invoice to | Hotel Bellevue, front office — attn. events |
If your numbers differ, the interesting question is whose numbers the Planner used — and whether your brief pointed it at the handbook.
The experiment (Marco's draft, sent unchanged): a well-built Planner often catches the CHF 90 — "the handbook lists the Winter Feast at CHF 95; I've used that" — but not always, and never reliably. The point is not whether the agent is smart enough to overrule you; it's that you shouldn't make it have to.
Why "done" is the managerial part
Context and task feel natural; "done" is the line most people skip — and it's the one that makes you a manager rather than a hopeful. "Deposit shown, invoice to the hotel, no Mondays" takes ten seconds to write and turns your review into the six crisp ticks on the exercise page.
Back to lesson 1