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PCJ 215: BUSINESS COMMUNICATION
WEEKLY PROGRESS REPORT GUIDELINES
A major component of this competency is your work with a nonprofit partner. Most of the major work of this competency feeds into and revolves around this project. This is your job for the course. You’re indispensable. People are depending on you to show up and put forth. This isn’t the sort of thing that you can put off until the last minute.
But human nature being what it is, despite our good intentions, the immediate crisis—the assignment due tomorrow, the work due at week’s end—tends to get more of our attention than the project that’s due at the end of the competency. The end of the competency can seem light years away at the competency’s start.
The project is actually a process, however. Your learning and success will come, not just from your final product, but also from how you managed the process. So you really have a series of deadlines throughout the term: one each week. There are several reasons for this, among them: Weekly deadlines will help you stay focused and spur you to continual thought and progress. They’ll help you discover problematic aspects early on and help you correct them before they become major. They’ll help keep you from going off the rails.
So each week, it’s a good idea to do a progress update[1].
Touch upon these things:
What your project is—remind us.
Why does it matter? Who is it going to help? How is it going to help?[2]
What’s happened since your last update? How much time have you put in? Doing what?
What do you have left to do? When will you have it done? Particularly emphasize what you’ll do by your next report (next week). But include all remaining components and your timeframe for completing them. Do the best you can planning.[3]
Share your successes and disappointments, hopes and fears. Everything will not turn out splendidly. That’s OK. We learn from that, too—sometimes even more than from instantaneous success. Something is only a failure if we allow it to defeat us–and do not grow and learn.
What lessons have you learned?
How will you build on your experiences to date, learn from what’s going on at this time and adapt?
TIMELINE AT END OF EACH REPORT
You know when your ultimate deadline is. Now, working backward from there, build your timeline. Put down the set deadlines: those for the first draft, the second draft, the final. Remember that you need to test your product between polished draft and final. Don’t forget to budget time to prepare your presentation. The key is to build in the steps necessary to get from where you are now to where you need to go. Adjust this with each weekly report, explaining what you’ve done and what you still need to do. You’ll adjust and adapt as you go along: this isn’t carved in stone. But the outline will guide you and help you focus. It will let you see, at a glance, where you are now and where you still need to go to cross that finish line victoriously.
Remember to count “THINKING” as work. Without heavy thinking, you accomplish nothing. The best projects embody lots of thought.
Feel free to include other information. The Progress Reports are an invaluable part of the journey and a great way to stay on track.
[1] This is vital to keep you on track. Without the progress reports, it will be much harder to complete your project and its process successfully. You will also draw on these reports for your Transmittal Letter to your client and your Journey Paper. Although you won’t pass the reports in to your instructor every week, they will serve as invaluable guides for you.
[2] Again, the better you can explain this, the better your project will be.
[3] The more detail you can give, the better able you’ll be to visualize your product. Once you have that vision, it’s just a matter of making it a reality. It’s not sufficient to say that you’ll have it done by the deadline. How will you make this happen? Laying out your blueprint—and then implementing it—is key to success. There is a direct and absolute correlation between the quality of the reports and the quality of the finished projects.