Briefing Note Writing and
Reviewing for Leaders
Diagnose problems quickly and train your team to solve them
This is a condensed version of Effective Briefing Note Writing, intended for managers and reviewers with limited time. It gives reviewers tools to review more efficiently, give stronger guidance to writers, and improve their teams process time and confidence.
It will reduce back-and-forth review cycles that consume writers’ and reviewers’ time.
Great workshop, I learned a lot and having BN examples that align so well with our work made it easy to see how to apply the suggestions. This will help me greatly when reviewing BNs for team members and other teams.”
— Manager in Ministry of Education
Workshop details
We customize our workshops to your organization, team, documents, templates, and style guides
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In-person—Half day (3.5 hours)
Live webinar—Half day (3.5 hours)
We can also offer 1- or 2-hour sessions for high-level leadership
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Anyone who reviews or assigns briefing notes
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We meet with you to discuss your group's challenges and goals
You send us a series of representative documents
We analyze your documents
We customize our course material using excerpts from your documents
We hold the workshop
What you’ll learn
An overview of the approach writers learn in our core Effective Briefing Notes course
What the role of a good editor is and isn’t
An editing checklist to verify structure, analysis, wording, and proofreading
Techniques to identify and diagnose common problems quickly
Ways to resolve repeating issues in briefing notes
How to give useful feedback and communicate changes to writers
When to make changes yourself and when to ask the writer to make them
How to use comments in Word, email, and face-to-face conversation
Steps to streamline the writing and review process across your team
Building organizational consistency
Receive higher-quality drafts to reduce your workload
Identify and resolve problems quickly
Give focused, constructive feedback to build collaboration in your team
It starts with a conversation
Before taking this course, it took me three full days to finalize a briefing note…After being halfway through and learning new techniques, I finished a briefing note in an hour and a half with limited editing! This course is a huge win for me and the work I do daily, thank you!
— Federal briefing note writer
This training was presented extremely well. I have taken past BN training from other organizations that was not as effective. The activities and documents being ready to use as we moved through the workshop kept me engaged and helped to fortify the steps in proofreading.
— Alberta Education
Great workshop, I learned a lot and having BN examples that align so well with our work made it easy to see how to apply the suggestions. This will help me greatly when reviewing BNs for team members and other teams.
— Alberta Education
