Advisory Report Guidelines

During class meetings where another team is delivering a progress briefing your team is expected to prepare an advisory report. You will have time during class to prepare this report following the briefing. Your report should adopt the following basic structure:

1. Initial Summary:

A 4-5 sentence executive summary of the progress briefing presentation in your own words. Your summary should highlight important areas of progress, notable achievements, areas of concern, and future work. The summary should be written such that you could send it to the presenting team’s client and they would be able to clearly understand the current status of the team.

2. Goal Review:

In this section you will provide a 3-4 sentence evaluation of each goal that the presenting team discussed during the briefing. You should reflect upon the extent to which each goal was achieved and the relative value of the goal towards the overall project based upon your current business understanding. Your evaluations should be honest, as your assessment of the team’s goals has no impact on their presentation score. The purpose of this step is to provide the team with worthwhile feedback, and there’s little insight to be gained if you afraid to cast critical judgement upon things that either did not work or were not useful

3. Steering Advice

Here you should describe suggestions for the team to pursue between now and their next progress briefing. You should draw upon your own areas of expertise and consider methods, models, and processes that you’ve used in the past that might benefit the presenting team. Your suggestions should be written with enough detail for the presenting group to be able to understand and implement them, and you should prioritize quality and depth over quantity.

Additional Information

• You are expected to interact with the presenting team during and after their presentation. This means asking for clarification when necessary and asking probing questions when more details are needed to fully understand a step or topic.
• Advisory feedback reports are due by the end of the day, but most of time you should be able to finish them during class. You should post your final report on the “Advisory Reports” discussion board on P-Web in the thread corresponding to the group you are advising so that the presenting team can reference them later.
• To reiterate, you should not hold back any honest criticisms you have of the presenting group. Your critiques will not impact the presenting team’s grade in any way, and providing honest feedback is the best way to help the team succeed. That said, you should frame your critiques in a way that isn’t mean spirited or overly confrontational, as ability to provide critical feedback with a positive framing is a valuable skill.