A professional project is not finished until all the paperwork and loose ends are tied up. Below is a list of the wrap-up requirements with their guidelines. As you prepare these documents, you’ll likely be re-using a lot of the same material, and you will be working closely with your project team to finalize all of these documents. It’s your responsibility to make sure that corrections you get from your project team on one document are applied to other documents as appropriate.

Client Deliverable Package (binder)

Your final client deliverable package typically consists of a final report, presentation slides, description of analytical tool (if applicable) together with a user manual to use and maintain the tool, and a CD of these documents and any additional software. Consult with your project team and client on what is to be included in your deliverable package and on the delivery date, and work out a schedule for reviewing with your project team. Typically you will need to produce two copies for the client and one for the COE.

COE Project Closure Report

If the client does not get a fully detailed report on your work, a closure report must be prepared that describes the scope of the project, any data collection and analysis, models or tools developed, analyses performed and scenarios run as well as any recommendations made. Were objectives met? Were there any specific challenges and how were they overcome? There is no requirement for this to any particular size. It does not need to cover every detail. The guidance is that it should be self-contained enough to enable a new person with no previous contact with the project to be able to understand your tools/models and to continue some extension to the work. Since most of our clients get a very detailed report, in most cases you only need to think about information that someone specifically at the COE with access to your files would need in order to move the project forward in the future.

One-page Project Description

This is a one-page summary of your project for COE marketing purposes, explaining the problem and opportunity, approach, solution, and benefits to the partner organization. The language used in this report should be general and easy to understand. See the past project descriptions on the COE website for reference. Your client will need to approve this before publication, so allow extra time in the editing process. The title for this and the poster will be chosen by your team before the end of project season.

Project Poster

The posters are for display at the COE public poster session and other conference opportunities. Your client will need to approve this before publication, so allow extra time in the editing process.

Mitacs Project Report

This is a final report of your project detailing your research goals, explaining the techniques used and describing your project outcomes and benefits for your industry partner. It is appropriate for this to be much more technical than the 1-pager or the poster. We will provide a template for this report.

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Roundtable Presentation

[Starting in 2015, we’ve done poster sessions instead of public “roundtable” talks; I’m moving this section to the bottom rather than deleting it because the advice here is possibly useful in other settings!]

When you start to prepare your slides for the roundtable, there are a bunch of things to keep in mind.

Intention

The point of this presentation is to show the audience what you ended up doing to solve a specific problem. It is NOT appropriate to take them through every step of your problem-solving process, or to explain technical procedures in detail.

• Stay focussed on the approaches you tried that ended up being useful; forget about other stuff you tried along the way.
• You need to keep your audience interested. One way to do this is to make your project itself sound fascinating (and we hope you will do this!); another way is to point out the aspects of your project that are universal or at least applicable outside of the specific context of this project. Everyone at some time has had to deal with change management; most people in this audience will have at least thought about the opportunities and challenges of analytics; many people will have some interest in supply chain management. Which of these elements can you include in your presentation?

Audience

The roundtable audience is made up of highly intelligent people who are interested in analytics. Some, but not all, of them have experience doing analytics. Some of your clients will be there, but the rest of the group may have completely different backgrounds. So, you need to take a step back from your project and look at it with fresh eyes.

• You can’t use the specialized vocabulary that you’ve gotten used to using with your client. You need to find non-technical ways of explaining important concepts.
• Don’t assume that you can re-use slides from client presentations: you may need to (at least) re-label everything to use non-technical language.

Time constraints

Short presentations take a lot of work to prepare. You need to make sure that you make all of your points clearly.

• As a preliminary draft (i.e. one that is just for you and you don’t show to anyone), it’s fine to make slides that are just text. Use these as a starting point for creating slides that get across the same ideas in more visual ways.
• For your future drafts, make sure that none of your slides are text-only. Instead, use colour, diagrams, and animations (in the sense of making components appear one at a time instead of all at once—stick with basic “appear” and “disappear” animations instead of any of their cutesy alternatives).

Structure of talk

You have very specific “learning objectives” for the audience: you want them to leave knowing (1) who the client was and what the problem was, (2) what you did to solve the problem, and (3) how what you did helped the client. Your talk will be structured so as to meet those learning objectives.

For 1, it’s a good exercise to compose the following:

• One sentence to describe the client (focussing on traits that are relevant to this project)
• One sentence to describe the problem the client was facing—try to give numbers to give a sense of the magnitude and importance of the problem.
• One sentence to describe the goal of the project

These sentences will form the backbone of your introduction. (You may need to expand on them, but it’s a good idea to at least practice summing these ideas up in one sentence each.) For example, the introduction to one project from 2013 could have been the following: “Telus is one of the largest telecommunications providers in Canada, with over 3 million personal mobile phone accounts. With two to three hundred delinquent accounts per month, Telus spends a lot of time and money on collection activities; when these activities are unnecessary, they waste agents’ time and run the risk of alienating customers. In this project, we investigated how customer characteristics are related to payment behaviour, with the goal of better targetting collections activities so as to achieve the same performance (in terms of debts paid) with less effort (in terms of collection activities undertaken).”

2 is a two-parter: you want them to actually get the general idea of what you did, plus you also want to impress them with how smart you are to do what you did. To do the former, you need to think hard about how to clearly describe the ideas behind the technique you use. To do the latter, you can flash up a bunch of visualizations of the result of your model. BUT this only works AFTER they already pretty much understand what you’re doing. Until they’re with you conceptually, giving them a bunch of details will just make them tune out.

For 3, try to be clear and specific—savings of $ or quantifiable improvements in outcomes are more impressive than delivering tools, even if you have to talk about what would happen if they implemented your results.

Delivering the talk

Again because of time constraints it’s important to polish your presentation.

• Make sure that you have a clear sequence of ideas that you’re going to be presenting. It’s generally better to focus on the sequence of ideas rather than on sticking to a specific script: it’s really off-putting when a talk comes across as overly scripted.
• Consider making a video of yourself doing your presentation, to get an idea of how your body language comes across.
• Remember that someone else is going to be introducing your presentation—they will say your name, the title of your talk, and the name of the project sponsor. Practice starting your talk by diving right into the client description.

Consistent look

• Over the course of the project, you may have produced a bunch of different graphics with different colour palettes or fonts. It adds to the polish of your presentation if you go through and make sure that there’s one consistent esthetic in all of your slides.
• In particular, make sure that colour is used in a consistent way across slides. A scenario or a group should always get the same colour when it appears in a graph.
• There is no standard template that you need to use: just choose something appropriate and un-fussy.

Printable slides

We’re going to be printing copies of the slides for all the attendees, so you’ll need to either make sure that all of your presentation slides look okay when they’re printed or else make an alternate version specifically for printing. Do this last, after all the content is finalized, but when making the presentation version of the report do remember not to layer too much on each slide.

Roundtable presentation: other audiences

In the lead-up to the roundtable, you will also likely give your presentation in two other venues. Use the same slides as for the roundtable; these presentations will double as extra dry runs.

• Seminar for the OpLog division: be prepared to answer detailed questions about your mathematical approach to solving the problem.
• Presentation to the incoming class: they’ll be interested in hearing about what you did, but also challenges you encountered and things you wish you’d known when you started the project. This is your chance to pass on your wisdom to them!