Week 3: Project Outline and Stakeholders

This week you will begin creating an outline for your project, and develop a plan for involving stakeholders in your planning process. Although in this course you are focusing on creating a plan or proposal for a new initiative, policy change, or program to improve institutional effectiveness, you can increase the relevance of your plan (and the likelihood that it could be implemented in the future) by sharing your work with an appropriate stakeholder audience, such as faculty or staff in the institution. Your Discussion and Assignment this week will give you the opportunity to consider how you will present your work, and to whom, in collaboration with colleagues.

Assignment: Project Outline and Stakeholders

For your Capstone Project this week, you will complete an outline of your plan/proposal and describe the stakeholder audience to whom you will present your draft project.

A key element of your Capstone Project is presenting your project to a stakeholder audience and obtaining their feedback on your plan or proposal.

In Week 6, you will informally present your draft project plan or proposal to a relevant stakeholder audience – an administrator, staff member, or faculty member at the institution you are targeting for your project, and/or an employer, alumni, or community representative. You may present your project to an individual, several individuals separately, or to a small group. Consider that the more people with whom you share your project, the more useful feedback you are likely to receive on the value and appropriateness of your project for that institution.

Using feedback from your colleagues and Instructor, revise your problem statement and rationale (submitted in Week 1), add your literature review, and develop an outline of your project plan or proposal. 

Your outline should include the following major elements:

· Goals for the project

· Description of the local context

· Activities, initiatives, or strategies to be used

· Deliverables or outcomes – what the project should accomplish

· How the project, if implemented, could be evaluated or assessed

· A proposed timeline that could be followed to implement the project

· A list of budgetary items – financial, human, or other resources – that would be needed to support the project

· The stakeholder audience to whom you plan to present your project plan/proposal, and reasons for their interest in the project

Assignment length: 1–2 pages for outline, ½ – 1 page for description of stakeholder audience. 

Also include your revised problem statement and rationale from Week 1. See professor notes

Professor notes below:

Your problem statement has great potential as your work meets the exemplary criteria of the attached rubric ! This is extremely well done as you frame the issue(s) perfectly and provided good supporting evidence and references

 (I would continue to encourage you to explore other research that may be out there related to this topic!). 

In the future, I would probably not use a Q & A format and just use section headers. And, be sure to expand on some points–i.e. what is the connection between friendliness and satisfaction for example? 🙂

 Good start here! P.S. I am so glad you are taking the class!