The assignments in unit two included: writing a formal report proposal, outline and progress report, creating a LinkedIn profile and researching bes practices as well as peer reviewing a classmate’s proposal and LinkedIn profile.
Formal Report Proposal and Progress Report
Having never written a formal report before I found these assignments helpful in creating a structure to later be used when I write the drafts of my report. I did not have much trouble coming up with a concept for my report since we have been discussing changing communication and task management tools at Skunkwerks Kinetic Industries for a month and I have already done some research regarding the topic. I found that writing the proposal for my report was easier than I expected it to be since the topic allowed me to closely follow the sections outlined in the textbook for a formal report proposal. Writing my outline was fairly straightforward since the structure of my research and report will be fairly straightforward and I have experience writing research based papers from my psychology degree. The schedule for my report was harder to come up with since much of my research was based on survey responses and interviews. I decided to distribute the surveys as soon as they were approved and collect them as late as possible to hopefully increase the number of responses. I feel that although I scheduled interviews for a specific day they are more likely to occur whenever myself and my project manager and the COO of the company have any free time at work. Overall I feel that the proposal and outline assignments were very helpful in cementing my ideas and structure for the formal report but I did not find the progress report to be particularly useful.
LinkedIn Profile
Prior to the assignment I had already created a LinkedIn profile but had not put much work into it. This assignment provided a good opportunity to sit down and spend some time working on updating my profile with current information and making it more presentable. I found that although some of the best practices I found while researching were helpful, such as the knowledge that anyone can give you an endorsement for anything so it is important to keep an eye on that section for random endorsements, many of the recommendations were simply common sense.
Peer Reviews
I have enjoyed peer reviewing my classmate’s work as it gives me an opportunity to learn from how others are writing their assignments as well as to learn more about my team mate’s interests and experiences. I have found the peer reviews of my own work to be informative and helpful both in recommendations on my content and organization as well as small spelling and grammar errors that I missed in my own editing. In his review of my formal report proposal Austin Lee made some very good comments on my content including suggesting I emphasize the ineffectiveness of SKI’s current system for tracking bugs in my report, which I intend to do.
This unit involved a lot of work but I feel like it created a good basis for me to write a well thought out report and it gave me to opportunity to work on my LinkedIn profile, which I had been meaning to do for quite some time.
My peer review of Paul Lee’s formal report proposal
SpencerLee-EditedReportProposal