The rhetorical situation: The typical audience for such reports includes supervisors and coworkers collaborating on the same project. Choose one progress report from the choices below and compose a response (framed as an e-mail) to the authors of the progress report. Take on the role of supervisor or chair of an executive committee. While your message will no doubt draw on a variety of rhetorical strategies covered in earlier chapters and assignments, you will decide on whether the response should be primarily, positive, negative, or persuasive, following the guidelines from Chapters 8, 9, and 10 of Thill and Bovée. As you develop your feedback plan, you should consider both the details conveyed in the progress report, as well as the format and prose of the report, since both convey something about the work and attitudes of the individuals who composed the progress report. You will have to determine how to frame your response to both positive and negative details, and you will need to determine what you desire to accomplish with your response: Do you desire to motivate? Do you desire to manage? Do you desire to correct? Etc. The progress reports to which you can respond are attached to this learning object. (Your instructor may provide others for this assignment.) Action items 1.Review the guidelines for progress reports in your readings (see Reporting to Business Audiences).
1. Create an informal list of evaluative criteria for such as report. What is their common aim? What makes them effective?
2. Read the sample progress reports attached to this learning object and assess how well they meet the criteria.
3. Choose one of them to be the focus of your reponse.Take on the role of a supervisor or executive accountable for the project in question. Which details of the report are praiseworthy? Which details might raise concerns or questions? Develop a feedback plan determining what you hope a follow-up message might accomplish and whether it should be primarily positive, negative, or persuasive (the final message may combine elements of all three).
4. Write your response, framing it as a formal e-mail message to the project team. You will submit it as a discussion posting in the next step
Progress Report
Introduction:
The purpose of this progress report is to give you an update on the status of our formal report. Mike is our internal consultant to ________Savings Bank, while Phil and I are outside consultants evaluating the current mortgage loan process.
Project Description:
The purpose of our report is to investigate customer complaints of slow loan processing time, increased man-hours to process loans to close and unsatisfied customers with the current process. Our accomplishments will include a better process for the loan process, additional time savings and fewer errors.
No changes have been made at this time to the scope or purpose of our loan process investigation.
Work Completed:
As of today our progress is excellent and we are on track to be completed by Mid-December. We have completed all of our surveys and have detailed progress as follows:
Mike has collected 8 internal employee questionnaires
Phil has collected 5 external customer questionnaires
I have collected 5 external customer questionnaires
We are in the middle of formulating our aggregate data to create visuals for our report. Once this is completed we will review the data and determine the most important visual to include in our formal report. We will probably derive five graphs with our data, but only include two in our report. After this is completed we will begin our rough draft.
Work Remaining:
Items that still need to be completed are as follows:
Collect data and design visuals
Deliver the oral progress report in the next class
Rough draft of the complete formal report
Review rough draft and make necessary revisions
Meet to discuss revisions and complete final draft
Present our findings in our final class and turn-in our final report
Conclusion:
Overall our progress on our findings is good. We are on target and will complete our full report by the last day of class in December. If there are any changes to our timeline I will prepare another progress report detailing our changes/issues.