Two of the main tasks I completed in unit three were the first draft of the formal report, and the peer review of my partner’s formal report. I have learned a great deal from these processes.

Formal Report

When I was brain storming for the scope of the formal report I thought I didn’t need to do much research or collect a lot of data because I came up enough discussion points to convince the management. Even when I completed my outline for the report, I still didn’t have a concrete plan in terms of data collection. Until Jasmine sent me an email, asking about my plans to collect data or interview questions, I realized that I should actually include some data to enforce my claim of the current situation of the company. It didn’t have to be really sophisticated data, simple historical revenue and number of active clients would be sufficient to demonstrate the profitability and the client base. Additional calculation of dividing the revenue by the number of employees would provide a rough estimate of the economics of scale of the company’s work force. With actual data, it would be a lot more convincing to the reader that I am making a proposal base on these facts. Another thing I learned that was a huge benefit for the writing process was to write an outline. Because during the writing process, I always forget the discussion points and sometime lose track of which part of the report I am writing. These causes the content jumping around and messes up the organization of the report. The outline keeps the content of the report contained and act as a great reminder especially it’s been written for a while. I can constantly refer back to it about what are the main points I intend to cover, what’s the order of the content. I finally realized the importance of an outline I started doing it at work, and it’s fantastic.

Peer Review Process

My partner wrote a report about something really interesting and sensitive, food safety in China. It has been a hot topic in recent years because there has been a lot of food scandals ranging from recycled cooking oil, selling rat meat as lamp meat, chemicals in dairy products and etc. It was interesting to read about her analysis and proposal to the government to resolve this issue. One thing she did extremely well was the organization of the report, especially the numbering system. She had an extensive use of sub numbers which enabled the content to have multiple layers. The depth of the report makes it look very professional. I am going to looking into the possibility of using a similar system on my report, I am not entirely sure how it will look because my content doesn’t have similar level of depths. I want to replace the bullet points with something else because they might have been a little bit too plain.

Process of Creating LinkedIn Profile

I have had a LinkedIn profile for a long time and I have always tried to keep it updated, such as adding in new accomplishments, new skills obtained, and updating education or professional training experiences. One thing I have never realized is I should have a summary. Hard cold facts about work experiences, education, and skills are important information, but you communicate your experience and passion at a personal level with potential recruiters in the summary section. I really enjoyed writing a summary about my background and passion at this moment.

Report Proposal and Outline

I started the process by looking at the list of topics chosen by previous students in the ENGL 301 course. There are some very interesting topics, but I found it difficult to write about something I don’t have deep understanding and knowledge of. It’s also difficult to be passionate about a topic that doesn’t affect me on a daily basis. I started to consider writing something about my work. I have been trying to propose my ideas of improving our software to my manager and my colleagues during our casual conversations. Although I had a somewhat concrete understanding of the different aspects of the issue, I felt this was a perfect opportunity for me the formalize it and put it into writing. I can focus on the high level analysis and discussions for this course, and expand with the technical details afterwards. This can turn into a formal report proposal I can present to senior management and try to make a change.

Peer Review Process

I found my partners choice of topic quite interesting primarily because I went to SFU as well and had firsthand experience of the winter traffic problem, and I was extremely interested in how he proposed to solve the problem. He provided some good suggestions but I found that he didn’t have enough angle covered on the issue. The main solutions were based on the assumption that the reason of transportation shut down was not having snow tires on the buses. I think it makes a better argument to first establish facts of if it is actually the case that the buses don’t have snow tires, does installing snow tires solve the problem, are there other reasons buses, cars cannot drive on the mountain, are there any other possible solutions. This reminds me not to over simplify a problem and I should try to look at the problem from different perspectives and thoroughly analyze it.

My partner provided some excellent suggestions to my proposal. I completely didn’t realize I didn’t have a single sentence in the introduction to summarize what issue I am trying to resolve. He also pointed out that I should have a small paragraph describing what my company does, which I think is a great idea. I did struggle whether I should do it when I first wrote the proposal and decided not to include it. But my readers will not only be people from the company, but also professor and TA from this course. Overall, my partner helped me to understand the importance of restating my problem statement to present a clear objective of my report, and to consider all possible audience.

Link to my peer review of proposal: assignment-21-peer-review-of-engl301-formal-report-proposal

Link to my edited formal report proposal: 301-Wei-Edwin-Chen-Formal-Report-Proposal-Edited