CS476/486 Senior Capstone Design

Weekly Task Report Guidelines

The weekly task report is an important project management tool. In the context of this course, it serves several purposes. Specifically it:

• Gives teams a basic framework for actively managing their projects. An evolving weekly task report is no substitute for a broad and complete project plan (e.g. something that you set up and track in MS Project or some similar project management tool), but it is infinitely better than just blundering through by feel. This ultimately avoids projects slipping silently behind schedule and ending up incomplete.
• Provides a nice black-and-white record of what is expected of each team member each week. Avoids frustrating misunderstandings about who was supposed to work on what.
• Provides a mechanism for exposing problems with team dynamics; invites discussion on how to repair them.
• Provides the mentor with a mechanism for monitoring teamwork and individual performance. Provides a clear record of who did what on the project during the grading term, and helps the mentor get insight into team project management (or lack thereof).

The format of the task report is relatively straightforward, reflecting its purpose of marking the passage of the team along their project timeline. The task report should be headed by team name, the week which the task report forecasts, plus the date of the team meeting at which the report is delivered to me.

Here is a handy MS Word version of the task report template to start out with!

The template includes a bunch of description of what goes into each of the fields. Your mentor may want additional details or another format altogether, but this template should provide a good starting point for that discussion.

Briefly, a weekly task report has three major sections:

Tasks finished since last meeting

This lists the tasks that have been completed since your last mentor meeting (i.e. in the last week). All you have to do is copy-paste the task from the "Active this week" section of the last task report, into this section, adding a small summary of task outcome to the "progress" section of the task. Note that this means that teams will need to meet BEFORE their mentor meetings to review progress, plan next week's tasks, and update the task report together...so that it will be complete, accurate, and ready for the mentor meeting.

Active tasks for the current (immediately upcoming) week.

A list of specific tasks to be worked on in the coming week. Each task should have a well-defined deliverable. For instance, if the task is to "learn about Java Beans", it should provide a deliverable like "give oral report to team" or "build small prototype". The point is that each task should have some tangible outcome so that I and other team members can assess to what extent it got done. This is particularly critical for larger tasks that span and will remain active for more than one week; here, you would make a note in the task somewhere about "Expected by end of this week", so that it's clear what progress on the larger task will happen this week.

Each tasks should state who is doing it; if multiple persons are working on it, the task should reflect the percentages of effort that the each person should contribute to get it done.

 

Upcoming tasks

This is just a listing of tasks you see looming on the horizon. Don't put the whole rest of your project here. Focus on tasks specifically related to (i.e., follow-ons) the tasks for the current week...things that will become active tasks in the next week or so. The idea is to give an impression of the flow and make explicit your prioritization. This way, a person can look at the current tasks and say "yeah, these are important because I see that they are needed to support upcoming work". Again, doesn't have to be exhaustive, just show that you have an idea of where you're going with this, what your priorities are, that you're not haphazardly hacking on things. In short, one would expect to see these tasks appear as "current tasks" in a subsequent weekly task report.

As far as prose goes, the emphasis here is on efficiency and clarity. You don't need to describe the tasks in question in exhaustive detail --- if your mentor has questions, he or she can ask. Generally the whole task report should fit on one-page (front and back).