Teamwork and Formal Reports
Organization and cooperation are probably the two most important factors of effective teamwork. It is absolutely necessary for all group members to know their part and to be able to work well with each other to produce the final product. This third style of writing, the team-based formal report, requires all members to master both of these traits in order to produce a successful final product. My experience in completing this assignment made it clear to me that a group is only as good as its weakest member, and my team was effective because each member contributed equally and completely understood each other.
The report was structured in a way that flowed well and was at some points repetitive, which allowed us to highlight our more important findings. We began the report with a letter of transmittal which stated our intent of doing research on a website that had usability issues. This was followed by a summary of the report and an introduction to the main body. In the body of the report we discussed our research methods, the data we collected during the testing stage, and finally explained the meaning of our findings. To wrap up the assignment, we closed with a summary of the entire report and explained our ideas regarding how to fix any issues with website usability.
The guidelines for this assignment also required that we locate at least six different publication sources that we could cite in our report which were intended to provide support for the ideas we discussed. You can see the places inside our report where we interjected the some ideas from sources we found. At the very end of the report we provided an annotated bibliography, which is essentially a works cited page that also gives a summary of each source and an analysis stating why we used it.
Here are links to the report and its guidelines:
Click here for the report guidelines.
Click here for the formal team report assignment.
After we finished the report we were required to report our findings in a short presentation. During the presentation we decided that, in order to aid with the understanding of the problems we found with the website, we would have our classmates use a computer while we were presenting. We told each person to go to CNN.com, the website we based our report on, and follow along with us as we explained the problems. We felt that interacting with our audience while we presented would be the best way to not only help them understand the problems we found, but also to simply keep them focused on our presentation. I think our technique proved to be very beneficial to our presentation.
The report was structured in a way that flowed well and was at some points repetitive, which allowed us to highlight our more important findings. We began the report with a letter of transmittal which stated our intent of doing research on a website that had usability issues. This was followed by a summary of the report and an introduction to the main body. In the body of the report we discussed our research methods, the data we collected during the testing stage, and finally explained the meaning of our findings. To wrap up the assignment, we closed with a summary of the entire report and explained our ideas regarding how to fix any issues with website usability.
The guidelines for this assignment also required that we locate at least six different publication sources that we could cite in our report which were intended to provide support for the ideas we discussed. You can see the places inside our report where we interjected the some ideas from sources we found. At the very end of the report we provided an annotated bibliography, which is essentially a works cited page that also gives a summary of each source and an analysis stating why we used it.
Here are links to the report and its guidelines:
Click here for the report guidelines.
Click here for the formal team report assignment.
After we finished the report we were required to report our findings in a short presentation. During the presentation we decided that, in order to aid with the understanding of the problems we found with the website, we would have our classmates use a computer while we were presenting. We told each person to go to CNN.com, the website we based our report on, and follow along with us as we explained the problems. We felt that interacting with our audience while we presented would be the best way to not only help them understand the problems we found, but also to simply keep them focused on our presentation. I think our technique proved to be very beneficial to our presentation.