Collaborative reporting project: Communication practices in a local organization

The collaborative reporting project has two main goals: to help you understand the role of communication in a specific organizational setting and to improve your ability to conduct research and develop communication products as a member of a team. The products your team will develop represent the genres professionals use to monitor and report on any project. They include a proposal, progress report, slides (a deck) for an oral presentation, and a final report.

By Monday 14 March, you will join a team of about three students to analyze communication practices in a local organization such as a hospital, retirement home, retail outlet, banking firm, hotel, restaurant, museum, or professional practice. The organization may be either for-profit or not; it may be a contractor that provides services to other organizations, for example, the university. The choice will depend largely on team members' expertise, interests, and access to an organization. The organization should have a site that the team can visit and employees and managers who are willing to be interviewed. You will need to conduct both on-the-ground research at the organization and Internet and other secondary research about it and the industry of which it is a part.

Your research will focus on communication practices, but you'll need to develop a background understanding of the context in which your organization exists: the industry or service sector it is part of, the neighborhood in which it is physically located, and any larger organization of which it might be a part. We'll discuss approaches to developing this background. In addition, consider some of these questions about communication practices:

Staff Communication: How is internal communication structured? How formal or informal is communication among employees or between employees and managers? Is communication predominantly horizontal or vertical? What are the communication networks (e.g. wheel, chain, circle, all-channel)? What language(s) do they speak? How is performance recognized or encouraged? How do staff communicate (written communication? oral?) What are the most common genres used (e.g. memos, emails, notices, progress reports, meetings)? What media are used most commonly (face-to-face interaction, e-mail, print)? How are these communication practices influenced by the contexts in which the business operates?

Customer-company interaction: How do customers interact with the staff? What genres are used to maintain customer contact and to manage customer relations (e.g. Website, face-to-face greetings, letters, emails, notices)? How formal or informal is communication between customers and staff? Are there any standards for customer-company interactions (e.g. specific templates, specific greetings)? What is the dress code (if any)? What is it intended to communicate? How are products or services communicated and promoted to customers? How are these communication practices influenced by the contexts in which the businesses operate?

In class, we'll discuss in detail how you will conduct your research and then incorporate your results in a final report. Each team will need to develop its own take on each assignment to suit its work. But here are broad specifications. All writing will be submitted electronically, by email attachment.

Memo proposing your team's reporting project
Due: Wednesday 23 March
Audience: Your teammates and your instructor
Purpose: To confirm your team's agreement on the topic and process for the project and convince your instructor that you can complete the work successfully.
Format: an email message, with internal headings, single spaced, no more than 2 pages
Content:
--Reiterate the project assignment, as your team understands it.
--Name the organization you will be analyzing. Justify why you have chosen this organization. Use the list of questions about the organization's context and communication practices as a springboard for your justification.
--Briefly preview your anticipated sources of information about the organization, including names of people you intend to interview as well as URLs and titles for Internet and other secondary sources.
--Describe the team's management and general procedures: leader; technology for collaboration; policies for communicating in non-class times, for dealing with a teammate who is not completing her/his tasks, and for archiving the team's correspondence, minutes of meetings, research findings, and draft as well as final versions of documents.
--Describe the team's tasks and task assignments, especially how the team will divide the research and reporting. Allocate tasks so that the work load of individual students is as equal as possible.
--Place these tasks on a time line (schedule) in visual form.
--Ask for approval or frame any questions you may have about the project that you want your instructor to answer.
--List all team members, with their email addresses and a brief sketch of each, especially the expertise they will bring to the project

Project progress report (individual)
Due: Wednesday 6 April
Audience: Your teammates and the instructor
Purpose: To report to your team and to your instructors on where the team-and you-stand in your research
Format: an email memo
Content:
--Assess the team's work against the schedule in your proposal.
--Assess your own work against that schedule.
--If there are gaps in that work, or if your research indicates the need for different work, note any corrective actions you think might be needed.
--Discuss the team's procedures and policies and note if any correctives are needed in the team's processes and what those correctives might be.
--Ask for advice, as needed, from the team or your instructor to solve any problems.
--Assure the readers that the project will be completed successfully

Final project report
Due: Monday 9 May
Audience: Someone at the organization you studied (either a real person or a hypothetical manager) who would be interested in your analysis, and your instructor
Format: formal report
Content:
Each team will submit one final report. The report should include the following (we'll discuss each element in detail in class):

A. Title Page: Organization name and a title that reflects your analysis of this organization's communication practices, name of the audience at the organization and instructor's name, date, names of the authors. A graphic element also adds aesthetic appeal.

B. Executive Summary: 1 page

C. Introduction: An overview of the organization and the report that leads into the following individual sections. About 1 page run into the rest of the report

D. The analysis itself, in detail. About 5 pages

E. Discussion and conclusion: Pull together the individual research strands to assess organizational communication practices at the site you studied. 1 or 2 pages.
Style. Cite sources using APA style.