Progress Briefing Guidelines

Description

Each progress briefing should take approximately 20 minutes, allowing for questions during the presentation. You should begin the presentation by restating your team’s current set of goals. The target audience of the presentation is our class. In other words, you should calibrate your presentation for an audience with some technical knowledge (models, methods, etc.) but limited domain knowledge (ie: business understanding).

You may use any format or combination of formats you’d like (PowerPoint, R Markdown, white board, etc.), so long as the entire class is able to follow along without getting bogged down by inconsequential details.

Depending your goals, a good briefing may include:

• Updates to your “business understanding”, including clarified client needs, data source updates, and newly identified limitations
• Data visualizations, tables, or spreadsheets conveying important data understanding aspects of the current stages of the project
• Diagrams, flowcharts, or small pieces of code/pseudo-code describing your data preparation work since the past briefing
• Descriptions, explanations, and results from the models/methods you applied

Regardless of your current goals, good briefing should end with a short summary addressing the following:

• Things that went well, didn’t go well, or took longer than expected
• A retrospective reflection on the viability of your previous set of goals
• A brief discussion of possible future directions for the next set of goals

The aforementioned list is not comprehensive and there may be additional important content that doesn’t fall under any of these bullets. You should use your best judgement in determining what information to include/exclude from your presentation.

Scoring

All group members receive the same progress briefing score based on the following dimensions:

• Clarity (0-10)
  • Fluency of communication
  • Use of best practices in communicating with data
  • Choice of visuals and diagrams
  • Other choices related to clarity (slide structure, verbosity, etc.)
• Depth (0-10)
  • Appropriate level of technical detail (remembering the target audience is our class)
  • No important details or steps are omitted
  • All goals are adequately discussed
• Accuracy (0-10)
  • Choices of methods and models are appropriate and correctly applied
  • Important decisions are justified and explained
  • Models and methods are accurately described

You should post any slides/materials used during your briefing to the “Progress Briefings” discussion board on P-web