Capstone Project Wiki

(Weekly project status updates are due by 5:00 PM every Wednesday.)

Regular, meaningful contact with your customer (sponsor) is a well-known strategy for success in product development. Remember, your task is to develop a product or process that meets or exceeds the needs of your sponsoring company. Only through contact with the sponsor can you truly know if you are meeting or exceeding their expectations. Weekly course corrections keep the team on track to complete the project in the most efficient and effective way. This communication is an essential part of your personal Engineering Decision Environment.

Additionally, the sponsor most likely knows more about the industry for which your product or process is being developed than anyone else involved in Capstone. It is to your advantage to draw on that knowledge weekly.

Teams are required to have meaningful contact with the sponsor every week with a short weekly status update, including appropriate attachments detailing progress on the project. Status updates are submitted by email to your sponsor, with copies to your coach and the Capstone office at capstonereports@byu.edu.

The subject line for the email must be: “Capstone Team # Status Update <Date>” with # replaced by your team number and <Date> replaced by the date of the report.

Status updates should:

• Reflect the true status of the project.
• Illustrate in what ways the team is meeting the sponsor’s needs.
• Have artifacts (either final or draft versions) attached that show the progress being made on the design.
• Be written in whatever format is most effective for your project and your sponsor; we recommend that you make them short, yet complete. Bulleted lists can work well in these reports.
• Report on the previous week's goals and the progress toward meeting them.
• Present the goals for the coming week (some of which may be carried forward from last week).
• Be free from grammatical, spelling, and other mechanical errors.
• Use formal English, rather than informal language such as texting language.
• Be helpful to the liaison in communicating with his or her supervisors.

Teams should report on their major accomplishments. The accomplishments should be summarized in the status update, and artifacts that reflect the accomplishments should be attached.

The audience for these weekly status updates and artifacts is the sponsor. The updates should be written for the liaison's boss, not just for the liaison. It is clear that teams must interact with the sponsor in order to do well in preparing their weekly status updates. It is expected that in addition to written status updates, you would have at least one interactive conversation each week with your sponsor in person, over the phone, or web telecon.

The most successful teams are likely to be those who make steady progress week by week, and who capture their progress in the form of appropriate, well-written artifacts that are attached to weekly status updates.

As you provide appropriate artifacts to your sponsor with the status updates, you are also preparing for stage approval and for the design reports to be submitted to the sponsor.

Rubric for evaluating the Weekly Status Updates.