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ASSIGNMENT #3: REPORT
Due Date for Draft: Monday, February 15, electronically, no later than 11:59 p.m. Send reports to the class email address: ba199ibw@oregon.uoregon.edu AND TO: ddusseau@oregon.uoregon.edu NOTE: Save all steps of your process: the rhetorical plan, the draft, the peer review you receive, the peer review you write for another, the revision plan, and the final draft. You will include these steps in your final project portfolio.
DESCRIPTION
Write a report to Dave Dusseau, with an executive summary and recommendations, advising him on actions he should take regarding the problem and needs you identified in your project proposal.
EDUCATIONAL PURPOSES OF THIS ASSIGNMENT
The educational purposes of this assignment are three-fold:
AUDIENCES FOR THIS ASSIGNMENT
Your primary audience is Dave Dusseau who has a responsibility to improve the career preparation of students taking Lundquist College of Business courses.
Your secondary audiences include:
THE RHETORICAL PURPOSE OF YOUR REPORT
Generally, as the writer of this document, you need to convince your primary and secondary audiences to act upon your recommendations to improve the career preparation of students within your focus group.
PROCESS
SPECIFIC GUIDELINES FOR WRITING THE REPORT
FORMAT
Please format your document as a short report. On a title page, provide a report heading that includes a title, your name and company name, and a date. Please do not use special folder/cover. It just adds bulk and is difficult to recycle.
Example of heading for a short report:
STRUCTURE
Structure your report by converting the following into subheadings for each section.
CONTENT
Executive Summary
1) Executive summaries appear first in reports but are always written last. You cannot write an executive summary until after you have a report to summarize.
2) Executive summaries provide readers a way to read the report at a glance. In length, they seldom exceed a page. Yours can be completed in the space of 1/2 - 2/3 of a page.
3) Include your executive summary as the first page following your title page. Use "EXECUTIVE SUMMARY" as a heading, and do not inlcude other sections of the report on this first page.
The executive summary includes:
Introduction
In the introduction, redefine the problem in a way that matches the recommendations in your report. Start by reviewing the problem statement from the BA 101 homepage, the statement of needs from your proposal, and the new problem statement you revised after completing the research. Be sure to explain how and why you narrowed the focus of your project to a particular group of students, business majors, business minors, or international students. The recommendations you provide in this report must address the needs of these students, employers of these students, and the Lundquist College of Business. Define these needs more specifically in this introduction. Check your recommendations against your introduction to make sure your recommendations match the needs identified.
Methods
In this section, list and describe the methods you actually used to investigate and analyze this problem and to generate solutions. These may differ somewhat from the methods you proposed in your proposal. That's ok. Things change.
Findings
Findings include the relevant facts your research produced. "Relevant" facts include any information useful to your readers for understanding your analysis, conclusions, and recommendations. Readers of your report will look hard at this section, for to produce a credible report you must show ample evidence of research and findings. The following sections, "analysis," "conclusions," and "recommendations," will all depend upon the strength of your findings. Do not evaluate, analyze, or express your opinion about the facts you report in your findings sections. Save those comments until later.
Use subheadings within this section so your reader will understand how you have organized your findings. Subheadings for the careers project, for example, could include:
(These are only intended as examples. The subheadings for findings related to your specific project may differ somewhat from these. Devise a way to categorize your actual findings.)
Analysis
The analysis section of your report needs to provide the link between your findings, on the one hand, and your conclusions and recommendations, on the other. Most importantly, your analysis must communicate the criteria you have developed for analyzing your findings and for developing your vision of an excellent or "cutting edge" career development program within a respected College of Business at a University.
Your analysis needs to answer the following kinds of questions: How can a cutting edge career service program best be measured within the four areas of career clarification, career research, career preparation, and career acquisition? What are the criteria for excellence in each of these four areas? What should a career development program achieve in these areas?
Then, your analysis needs to analyze your findings in relation to the criteria for evaluation you have identified. How do the existing current services stack up to these criteria? How do they fall short?
Furthermore, you will need to develop some rationale for recommending a sequence of services. What services need to be offered to freshmen, sophomores, juniors, and seniors.
An effective analysis will prepare your readers for your conclusions and recommendations. Once they have read your introduction, findings, and analysis, your readers should be able to predict what you will recommend. If your recommendations come as a surprise, or if they are not clearly connected to your findings and analysis, your report will not convince your readers to take action.
Conclusions
In this section, draw general conclusions that point toward the recommendations you will provide in the final section.
Example: Based upon our findings and analysis, we conclude that the career services currently offered by the University and the Lundquist College of Business meet some, but not all the needs of international students for career clarification, research, preparation, and acquisition. In particular.....
Then specify what you mean by this statement.
Recommendations
In this section do three things:
It should go without saying at this point that the recommendations you provide should arise directly from your findings, analysis, and conclusions. Otherwise, your readers will not find them convincing. Make sure your report continuously builds a case for your recommendations.
DESIGN and STYLE
For more information on these aspects of writing an effective report, see:
EVALUATION CRITERIA
To satisfy course requirements, your document must:
MORE GENERAL INFORMATION ABOUT WRITING REPORTS
Business professionals write reports for three primary reasons:
1) Communicating Information:
Complex organizations often have difficulty ensuring their members are working with the same information. If you imagine the child's game "telephone," where one child whispers a sentence into the ear of another child and each successive child repeats the process around a large circle -- then amplify size of the circle hundreds of times -- you can begin to imagine the communication problems companies experience. Therefore, persons within complex organizations write and distribute reports as an attempt to stabilize information and control the damaging effects of misinformation. Reports that serve this organizational purpose are often purely informational in nature. That is, they "report" information without analysis or recommendations.
2) Maintaining Accountability and Producing an Organizational Memory:
Within complex organizations, every person has distinct responsibilities, yet there are few ways to account for the production of individuals, teams, and (on the largest scale) the productivity of the organization itself. As you saw when you read the web pages on total quality management, every phase of the management of quality within organizations results in the production of a report. These reports are used to refine and improve processes, to encourage and reward productivity, and to evaluate performance.
Organizations, as they are at least in part composed of persons, also have memories. Yet we all know that what people remember and what they forget varies widely. If organizations depended upon the memories of their members, they would soon find that they have no coherent history. Organizations lacking a memory tend to waste their resources by continually "reinventing the wheel" -- solving the same problems over and over again. Furthermore, individuals within organizations come and go, and organizations with long histories outlive individual persons. Therefore, persons within complex organizations write and distribute reports to create a memory the organization can pass on to others.
3) Recommending Solutions and Courses of Action:
Organizations are always in the business of not only gathering, but also interpreting and acting upon information. In this sense, information is truly a "resource." While organizational and economic analysts once concluded that "natural resources," "labor," or "technology" consitituted the primary resources for adding value to an organization, many analysts today conclude that "information" itself constitutes the primary resource for producing other forms of value. When you consider "information" as a resource, it becomes much easier to understand why reports often make something out of the findings they report. They do this by analyzing the findings and generating conclusions and recommendations from their analyses. In this class, you are writing a report that moves beyond merely "reporting" information to your reader to recommend actions based upon that information.