Computer Science Capstone Design

Task: Team Progress Update

Overview

There are both formal and informal ways to communicate the progress of your team. On the formal end of the spectrum, you have the Design Review, which is an official "review of record" for the project. These usually only happen every three to six months, and give a fairly comprehensive review of the project and its status, along with enough detail to allow outside reviews not closely familiar with the project to evaluate progress.

Perhaps the most common "team communication" of all in a real work context is an informal "quick update" on what the team has working on and the status of work. This could happen as frequently as every week, where a larger project has an "all-hands" meeting where the very smaller subteams working on particular modules or pieces of the large project come together to touch base and work out issues that span subteams. Or maybe it's the "Group meeting" for your company, where all teams from all projects in the company (or group within the company) come together and report out, ask for help with things they are stuck on, and generally re-establish the big picture.

The purpose of this little task is to practice this skill...and learn from watching other teams handle it more or less well.

The Assignment

Whenever this "Team Updates" task comes up, you will want to prepare your talking points in advance, so that you can just stand up and efficiently review your project's status.

The overall plan for these little "pop-up report-outs" is always pretty much the same. You have no more than three minutes; in many companies these report-outs might even be limited to 60 or 90 seconds. The challenge is to use this short time effectively to present a maximally clear overview of where your team is on the project. The answer *is not* to talk at warp speed to create a wall of words equivalent to a verbal fire hose!

Instead, the key is to prepare your thoughts (and perhaps a little 3x5 notecard) in advance, to have your main talking points worked out, so that you can present a nice coherent story (here we go again: it's all about coherent flow of topics and presentation to create a nice digestible story!) well within the short time limit.

Here is a recommended topic flow for your short update:

1. Remind people of what project you're working on.

   "Hi I'm Quasimodo and I'm representing Team XYZ. We are working on a <brief review of the project>. Our client here is <brief review of client and maybe one-sentence overview of what they want to do with your product>.

   Note that (unlike your doc intros or DR intros, you do NOT have to "sell" the product here, i.e., you can skip the "big picture" overview and trying to convince people why they product is to cool/important/valuable. These listeners are in your company/group; they just need to be reminded of what your project is all about.
2. Now *overview* where you are (project phase) on the project, and what activities your group has been doing lately. For this "update", pretty much all of you are going to talk about your work with the client to extract/refine requirements (how did you do that, how is that going, how far are you to being done). Plus, in parallel, you've been trying to identify key design decisions and explore ways of dealing with them. This is your lead-in to...
3. Tech challenges. If needed (some projects this will be obvious from #1, others need a tad more clarification), deepen detail just a bit: Outline how your product will work, sort of the key user flow. Just a high level view, not nitty gritty detail...just enough to understand an upcoming overview of tech challenges. Then use this to intro the challenges: "our analysis of what key functional pieces we would need to implement a product like this led to three (four, whatever) key design decisions: X, Y, Z
4. Results: you don't have time to review all your feasibility work in any detail! Just say something like "over the last several weeks we dove in, identified possible solutions to each of these issues, and then did some brief testing and analysis of features and performance to make some preliminary decisions about feasibility and the core technologies we'd use. Then just state what products you chose (maybe with a one-sentence highlight of why you chose it) for each one.
5. What's the plan going forward. Here you're going to wrap up. This is a great place to mention any remaining quandaries or issues (if any exist) you're chewing on (maybe someone in the audience has a solution idea!). Plus you're going to outline where you're going next...for this update, that'll probably be some info on how you'll finish your requirements and on further tech explorations (leading to tech demo).

That's it! Each of the topic items above should easily fit into more or less 30 seconds; efficient presenters will get it all done in 90 seconds or so.

Deliverables

None! You do this live, off the cuff! Okay, not quite "cold"...you should decide who's going to speak, and that person should do some preparation in advance, e.g., the team talks about flow/topics to help the speaker make a little notecard of talking points as a "handrail" to ensure an efficient, streamlined talk.