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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 upon your progress.
The midterm report deliverable should reflect your team's professionalism and attention to detail. It should be free of grammatical errors, with attractive formatting, and thoughtful content. Your 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 reengage them with the project, the problem your project addresses, and the value of its proposed solutions.
Share with them your work plan and what your team has accomplished so far. Highlight your plans to complete your project within the allotted timeframe.
If there are any changes that 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 team's proposed adjustments.
First, as a team, you need to decide the form of your deliverable.
Your deliverable will inform your sponsor of the progress of your project, your findings, and its value. Your team must determine the best method to present this information. Some common methods include:
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:
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:
The 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:
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.
This content is provided to you freely by Ensign College.
Access it online or download it at https://ensign.edtechbooks.org/projectbasedinternship/presenting_your_report.
