Observation over the past decade has shown that Capstone students often struggle with producing quality deliverables. In spite of their best efforts, student teams can be greatly challenged in producing cohesive, polished, and informed reports. No doubt, the biggest contributing factors for these challenges are:

• Lack of experience producing professional deliverables
• Not being entirely sure of expectations
• Poor time management
• No true collaboration (it’s should be more than divide and conquer)
• Not following the right process

Most challenging of all is that these outputs are client-facing. The people reading through student reports could possibly be averted from being their future employers. Yep. The struggle is real! Fortunately, this survival guide is here to help you avoid numerous facepalms.

Understand What’s Expected of You

Among the things your team does before the course starts, there are 3 things in particular that you’ll find greatly helpful in setting up the road to winning.

1. Know what the deliverables are and when they’ll be due. Take some time to look at the deliverable below map and read through the course outline as a team. Do a workback schedule to determine a rough schedule for the work that you’ll be doing. 
2. Understand deliverable requirements. Run through the ‘Guidelines for the Group Project’ document and for each section (ex- intro, performance assessment, gap analysis, etc.) discuss what that that section should address, why it’s important or why the reader should care about it, and what tools or information will be needed to effectively respond to that section. It’ll also be worthwhile to check out samples of exemplar deliverables so that you know what to expect.
3. Brush up on your knowledge and skills. Let’s face it, it may have been a long time since you victoriously ran through that managerial finance course or since you plotted out a swimlane diagram. You were required to take all those courses for a reason – simply to prep you for the Capstone course. Take some time before the course starts to get refreshed on the following:
   • Agile project management concepts
   • BPMN
   • Requirements gathering and analysis
   • Cost-benefit analyses
   • Feasibility analyses
   • Project-specific knowledge (e.g., security, marketing)

Be United in All Things

Reports submitted to the school and to clients can be disjointed and have many ‘voices’. Yes, people need to take ownership over the report parts they’ve been given and each person has a unique writing style, but that doesn’t mean that readers should be able to pick up on the various voices speaking in a report. Teams need to be united in both the report and presentation, not fragments of parts sewn together. It can be really distracting and impede the flow of the document.

This is your chance to practice real collaboration by working as a team to come up with an outline of ideas for each part and doing team read throughs before deliverables are due. Aim to have your deliverables done 3 days before the due date and carve out several hours to run a team read through and revision session. At this session, group members should take turns reading out loud sections they have not written while 1 or 2 people document the group’s feedback and questions. Then each member should silently read through the entire deliverable and use Google Doc or Track Changes features to document additional feedback. Finally, the team should discuss all of the feedback and make revisions together.

Solutioning

Time and time again, teams will start coming up with a solution well before a clear picture of the problem is outlined and the necessary assessments are made. This presents a huge issue and risk to your project since it’s almost impossible to make informed decisions and come up with relevant, realistic, and beneficial suggestions before you have all of the right information. The key to mitigating this challenge is to follow the consulting process outlined in Part 2  and to make sure your team has done the appropriate research. Don’t underestimate the power that research yields.

When the time is right to finally showcase possible solutions, expound on no more than 2-3 and come armed with the pros, cons, and gaps in each solution.

Formatting

Formatting. ^does. matter. Though, focusing on formatting should be saved only until the very end, well after the content has been laid out, you’ll still need to make sure your design and other elements are consistent and not distracting. You want to create a reading experience that helps the reader along, not one that smacks them on the face everytime white text is put on a cyan background (you know who you are).

At the very least, your report should have:

• A cover page with all of the essentials (hint: this isn’t the place to lay out other courses you’ve taken or mention a recent award you’ve won)
• Page numbers that are consistently in the same spot on every page apart from the cover page where there shouldn’t be a page number
• Proper headings and subheadings
• Paragraph breaks when thoughts change. Paragraphs that are full page make people’s eyes water with resentment.
• Appropriate line spacing between lines and paragraphs
• Legible diagrams. If the reader needs to zoom in to 500 then somethings seriously wrong.
• References to diagrams whether in the main body or in appendices. Do not just throw in a cool diagram and expect readers to know what to do with them.
• Font size 12 for normal text
• Font type that’s easy to read. Do not make your entire document Curlz MT. In fact, no part of your reports should have this font. Be professional, people!
• If using scales of any sort, define what the scale is (ex- 1 means x and 5 means y)
• Colours that aren’t distracting. Colours are okay to use as long as they’re subtle and help to emphasize, not take the reader’s attention away.