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Have a midterm meeting with your sponsor and present your midterm report documentation.
Show your sponsor what has been accomplished with clear concrete examples and any impact or value your project has created for the sponsor's business.
Communicate a clear vision and dynamic plan within the context of the sponsor's business that will demonstrate how your project will create maximum value throughout the second half of your project.
A midterm report is an opportunity to take inventory of your project progress mid-way through the semester and plan for the second half. The midterm report consists of two parts:
Creating a report (or deliverable) with your team/co-workers (or as an individual intern if you have no co-workers). You will work with your team/co-workers/or as an individual to prepare a deliverable that will communicate to your sponsor your individual/team's findings, progress, and plan to move forward.
Presenting or reporting on your progress to your company sponsor. You or your team will meet with your sponsor to present your deliverable and gain valuable feedback.
It is important to share the midterm report with your company sponsor to:
Confirm that the scope and deliverables are still relevant (changes could have occurred in the company or marketplace).
Confirm that the work plan will still reach the deliverable targets.
Give an update on your progress and report on what has been accomplished.
Share what information and insights have been gained so far during the project.
Suggest changes based on new findings or approaches.
Define a path forward and project results.
Modify sponsor expectations as needed to ensure success.
Ask for help and commitments as needed from the sponsor.
Discuss the date, time, and location for the final presentation.
The following video illustrates a team discussing why they need to have a midterm report.
Have you ever been using a GPS or navigation on your phone and taken a wrong turn? What does your GPS do? Most likely, it will recalculate your route and work plan directions. In your projects, you may sometimes need to recalculate your direction. Part of the midterm report will be determining whether or not you need to recalculate the course of your project.
Based on your team/co-workers' discussions, you might discover that you need to change direction or adjust what you are doing for your sponsor.
The following image shows a spectrum of where the progress of your report is at:
If everything is going well, then keep it up! Continue updating and referencing your work plan, communicate regularly with your sponsor and TA, and continue to achieve your deliverables. Search for ways you can exceed your sponsor's expectations.
Take a step back and see what needs to happen. If you cannot complete all the work by the semester's end, determine with your sponsor what the high-priority items are and adjust your work plan accordingly. If your work plan is too short, determine whether you need to adjust your timeline to more accurately reflect time commitments, or if you need to add more deliverables.
You will need to meet as a team/co-workers and determine what your project needs to continue moving forward. You may not need to make many adjustments, or you may need to completely change what you are doing. Regardless of any changes in your project, you need to report everything to your sponsor in your midterm presentation.
Reflection Questions
Is your project on track to deliver everything you promised in the engagement letter? Why or why not?
Will you be able to do more than you promised in your engagement letter? What would that be?
What if anything will you need to change about your project? (Deliverables, Work Plan, etc.)
The following videos show different plans of action you may need to take depending on the status of your project. These videos may help you understand the three scenarios described above.
You will need to meet as a team/co-workers and determine what your project needs to continue moving forward. You may not need to make many adjustments, or you may need to completely change what you are doing. Regardless of any changes in your project, you need to report everything to your sponsor in your midterm report. For Individual interns (Work-Experience or Community-Serving) all of the same analysis as mentioned for teams/co-workers will still need to occur and a midterm report delivered.
The following information will help you create a midterm report.
Before it is time to meet with your sponsor to deliver your midterm report, you need to determine how you will present your information and report on your progress.
The midterm report deliverable should reflect your or your team's professionalism and attention to detail. It should be free of grammatical errors, with attractive formatting, and thoughtful content. Your mid-term report deliverable should answer the following questions for your sponsor:
Your sponsor may be working on several projects simultaneously. It is unreasonable to expect them to recall all of the information associated with your project. This is your opportunity to re-engage them with the project, the problem your project addresses, and the value of its proposed solutions.
Share with them your work plan and what you or your team has accomplished so far. Highlight your plans to complete your project within the allotted time frame.
If any changes need to be made to the final deliverables, discuss them with your sponsor. Provide an outline through which negotiation can take place so that they can provide their perspective. Be sure to show the original agreed-upon deliverables and your or your team's proposed adjustments.
Your deliverable will inform your sponsor of the progress of your project, your findings, and its value. You or your team must determine the best method to present this information. Some common methods include:
a PowerPoint presentation
a full-length technical report
an executive summary
a review of databases, spreadsheets, charts, tables, and other intermediate resources
a review of your work plan
There are multiple ways you can organize your report, but we recommend two main methods: the journey/academic method and the pyramid principles method.
The journey/academic presentation method chronologically illustrates the start of your project to its end, highlighting the main points along the way. This method is particularly helpful to those who will implement your recommendations as it allows them to see all of your data and how you developed your hypothesis.
In this method, your work should be organized in the following order:
Review the purpose, scope, and deliverables of the project.
Describe the work process you developed for your project.
Review your preliminary data.
Describe any analysis that needs to be performed.
Suggest hypothesized conclusions.
Suggest potential recommendations.
Outline your path forward to completing the project. This would include any agreed-upon modifications from the discussion surrounding your presentation.
The pyramid principles method works well when presenting to the decision-makers of a company. In this method, you should only show the portion of your data that supports your conclusions rather than document all the steps you have taken. After you present your purpose and scope, you should immediately present your recommendations.
In this method, your work should be organized in the following order:
Review purpose, scope, and deliverables.
Identify potential recommendations based on results from your early work and analysis.
Suggest hypothesized conclusions based on your early analysis.
Review interesting data that supports these conclusions.
Discuss the path forward to completing the project, including any agreed-upon modifications that came from the discussion surrounding your presentation.
Once you have successfully prepared the deliverable for your Midterm Report, next, decide how you are going to format your meeting. The following are some possible methods:
single presenter
group presentation with multiple presenters
read-through of the written report with an added summary
group discussion of the report
group brainstorming of where to go next
To better understand these two methods of presentation, please watch the following video of Professor McCarty discussing his vacation.
Roger McCarty: When writing a report for a project, you are basically telling the story. The story you tell will be different depending on the audience that you are addressing. For many audiences, hearing a story from start to end is a great way for them to understand the elements of the story. For top executives, they prefer to hear the end of the story first and then to tell you how you got to the end. So let's look at different ways of telling the story. Let's start first with the journey method from start to end.
My wife and I recently visited Scandinavia as part of a family heritage vacation. We have been asked by others how we liked it and should they try that vacation. In using the journey method, we would follow this outline:
- How did we decide to go there?
- What travel options did we consider and which did we choose?
- How did we make our reservations?
- We could describe the travel to Copenhagen and the problems with the connection in San Francisco.
- We could review the process of getting to the ship from the airport.
- We could talk about our travel to Norway and describe each city we visited and what we liked and didn't like about the city.
- We can show copious pictures and videos of each stop to describe them.
- We could describe how we transferred to a second cruise ship for a second week to Sweden, Estonia, Russia, and Finland.
- We could describe the highlights and what worked and didn't work, and then we could recommend that we think they should do it and how they should plan and reserve their vacation.
That would complete a journey approach to a report. Now let's look at the top-down pyramid principle approach and how we would tell a top executive whether or not we thought they should go to Scandinavia.
We would start with how did we decide to go there, was it a good decision? The answer is, “Yes, you should go and here is why.” Explain the impact the culture had on us and the history we relived. Show how impactful the people, architecture, and inspiring natural beauty was upon us. We could highlight key can't-miss sites such as the fjord going into Geiranger, Norway or the Church of the Resurrection, also called the Church of the Blood, in St. Petersburg, Russia. We could review key tours, museums, and sites in specific towns. We could review which travel groups were the best value and met our needs. We could look at companies' websites and locations to avoid.
In summary, we could review why you should go and how you should arrange your travel. The journey method allows you to relive the journey and lays a roadmap for how someone could follow your recommendation. The top-down method tells you if we think you should go and why you should go and key factors in making the decision and implementing the trip.
Remember your TA Coordinators are some of your best resources for this class—use them! When you need counsel, advice, and support, turn to your TA Coordinators. Feel free to ask them to review your deliverables and reports for quality, completeness, and professionalism. If you plan on using generative AI to help with your report, please refer to Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI).
The midterm report can be challenging if you/your team are not where you planned on being when you started the project. Further, you will soon receive feedback from your teammates/co-workers and company sponsor. While it may be discouraging, it is important to not be too hard on yourself or your teammates.
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints has a course called Finding Strength in the Lord: Emotional Resilience. In this course, they show us how inaccurate thinking can be harmful and how we can avoid it. Constructive or negative feedback can be very helpful, however it needs to be offset by positive thinking and positive feedback. Having a balanced insight will help us improve.
To avoid inaccurate thinking, consider the recommendations from the Emotional Resilience Class. Click on the link to read the paragraph and chart under 2. Recognizing Inaccurate Thinking Patterns and then consider your own thoughts about yourself and your teammates.
When you or your team are feeling discouraged, consult this chart to identify examples of inaccurate thinking that are causing you to have a negative attitude. You can overcome many forms of discouragement with a little positive thinking and eliminate inaccurate thinking from your vocabulary. Come back to this chart as often as needed to maintain a positive attitude and continue to move forward with your project and team.
This content is provided to you freely by Ensign College.
Access it online or download it at https://ensign.edtechbooks.org/projectbased_internships/the_midterm_report.
