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Draft electronically signing order

in this lecture I'm going to give you some feedback on the project draft that you handed in last week during the engineering test week and I will also discuss the instructions for submitting your peer feedback on these project drafts first I'm going to explain how I assess the completeness of the drafts that were submitted then I will give you feedback on general errors I picked up in part a section one to four I will discuss why I will no longer allow electronic signatures and what we'll do instead of that then I will recap on what is required for the meeting minutes because many of you seem to be confused about that and then finally I'm going to get into the instructions for giving the peer feedback the peer feedback is due this Friday the 20th of March at 11:00 11:59 p.m. okay so if we go to the study guide this table comes straight out of the study guide you will notice that the group project Part A counts 50% of your semester mark what you handed in last week the draft submission is part of that 50% if you go and have a look at the part a rubric which is on click up you'll notice that last week's submission counted 10% of that 50% for group project Part A so in other words it counts 5% towards your final semester mark you either got a 0 if you did not submit a draft or submit an incomplete draft or you got three out of three in other words the full 10% if you submitted a complete draft now in the study guide it states that a complete draft contains sections 1 to 4 of Part A with all elements attempted or completed as we discussed in class the elements are the bullet points on the rubric for each of these sections there are a total of 284 project groups in BSS 310 275 of the group submitted their drafts before the submission deadline when I went through the 275 submissions I found that only 240 were complete drafts that means that a further 35 groups also got zero out of three for handing in what I consider to be an incomplete draft so if you are part of one of these 44 groups that now have received zero out of three you've effectively lost out on five percent of your semester what I want to point out is that even though 5% hurts it's only 5% so what did I consider a complete draft if your draft was missing one of the elements in the bulleted list then I still considered it a complete so I was lenient in that sense many groups did not put in their problem identification technique there only gave me the problem statement which is not what the rubric requires some groups forgot to specifically specify their target market some left out the value proposition if you left out Porter's five forces or the marketing map I consider all of these to be elements of the sections some groups did something very funny or did not put in their SLRs this is probably because they were working from an outdated project rubric and not the updated one which is on clique up some groups left out the objective tree or the TPM table and a lot of groups only looked at the primary activities of their value chain design so if your group project had one of these bullet points missing then I was gracious towards you and said that your project was still complete however if you had more than one of these missing then it was according to me incomplete a couple of groups did something really funny with the value chain design section I do believe that they were not in class for a couple of weeks and then in that case if your entire section was very wrong then I also considered that to be incomplete in the submission instructions for this project we were very clear about the specific file names that we wanted you to use when submitting your your project drafts the reason for those specific instructions is to enable us to automate the process in the backend part nine groups handled incomplete drafts with a incorrect filename so as I said in the announcement last week those groups only got 5% I also said in the announcement last week that groups who do not hand in their meeting minutes or who fail to follow the instructions for the meeting minutes in the cover page would also be penalized and would get 0 for the submission however when I went through all the meeting minutes it seemed that it was extremely difficult to follow these instructions and about half of the groups would have gotten 0 if I enforce that so I decided to let that go for this all right getting into my feedback section one a number of groups use the five why's as a problem identification method when we did this in class I mentioned that the five why's is really just a warm-up exercise to start your brainstorming session I don't consider it a very rigorous problem identification technique there are three techniques that you can use it's the problem identification flowchart the InnoCentive method or the Ishikawa diagram so if you did the Firewise exclusively please go back and complete and or inserts another method as well you must show how you used your chosen problem identification method many of you would state that you used one method or the other and then just give me the problem statement for the purpose of VSS 310 I want to actually see the process that you followed in problem identification and not just your problem statement then many of you are handing in problem statements that are two or three sentences long a comprehensive problem statement is about two to four paragraphs should be around about half a page and we look through a comprehensive example in class from the innocent webpage and you have the link to the InnoCentive webpage and I would recommend that you go and look through a few other examples as well do not describe your solution in the problem statement I think we've been through over this a couple of times but some of you already introducing your product or your service in your problem statement and then trying to substantiate why it's a good idea through your problem statement in section two I was intrigued by some of the marketing maps that I found a couple of you gave me a screenshot of Google Maps to show me where your market is in pretoria I even received a vector diagram someone do a relational diagram of their stakeholders there's a very clear example in unit 2 slide 13 of what a marketing map is it's also called a positioning map and if you google marketing map or positioning map you'll get many more examples as well many of you are showing me your segmentation approach or walking me through your segmentation approach before you describe your target market because you have limited space I did not require you to do that so you do not have to show me how you describe each one of the different segmentation characteristics you can just describe your target market and that can be in the form of a buyer's persona or in a paragraph format if you did do the segmentation in the background it will be clear to me through what you described in the target markets if your target market paragraph is one or two sentences or it simply states students on campus then I already know that you didn't do the segmentation properly then with regards to put as five forces I want to emphasize the word forces many of you just described who your buyers and suppliers are and who your competitors are but you didn't describe the force that those buyers or suppliers exert on your company or how this competitive landscape would push your company in a certain direction then the value proposition is not a slogan or an ad so many of you are trying to come up with really creative ad advertisement language it's like it's something that you can use on a poster or in a radio ad that's not a value proposition it's slightly more factual than that and it must be concise a number of you are giving me value propositions are about half a page to three-quarters of a page long remember it's something that you must be able to tell someone in normal natural speech within about 20 to 30 seconds in section 3 I noticed that a couple of groups are still working according to the very very first rubric for Part A that rubric was updated back on the 13th of February and has been available on click up please make sure that you check back to click up before your final submissions to make sure that if there have been any updates to the rubrics that you're working according to the right rubric please be aware that if we cannot greet the objective tree because your font is too small then we cannot market many of you are shrinking your diagrams down because they're actually too big and you're squeezing them into small spaces but if we cannot read it we cannot mark it and I want to turn the line that it's an objective tree not a function tree a few projects gave me a functional breakdown of their product which is not at all what what an objective tree is please go back and review the notes of the purpose of the objective G a number of you are prioritizing your TPMS it's not required and the rubric in the project so you're doing that extra you're more than welcome to do it but I would recommend that you don't do it in a separate table because you are wasting very precious space in for Section four you must describe each of the primary and support activities for your business I understand that you'll have more to say about certain activities than others but you do have to say something about each because I need to see that you have considered what that area of your business looks like then in general I want to say that I'm impressed with the many creative and relevant ideas I have enjoyed looking to your problem statements though is that I read briefly and I see a lot of creativity in the project so that that is very encouraging to see I've seen a couple of innovative perspectives on everyday problems things that I didn't think about and some of your projects show that you actually do have a really deep knowledge of the product or service that you want to develop and that's also really great to see in general I want to caution you that a number of you are wasting your page space some of you are using one point five line spacing that wastes space you have massive white spaces in between sections some of you have very large margins especially those of you that are working in lettuce more than welcome to work and let's say it makes things look really professional but then you can customize your margins so that you have less wide space be aware that when you use bulleted lists and numbered lists they actually take up a lot of space because of all the line spacing in between them so what I would recommend is that you actually write a paragraph full sentences it would end up taking less space and it would be more readable be careful of adding nice-to-haves so pictures that don't add to the explanation of what you're doing or descriptions or paragraphs or extra tidbits that aren't required according to the rubric even though these are nice to see they will make you go over your page length and then that will penalize you in the end then some of you are already working on your reports aesthetics in other words you're paying attention to the formatting and the referencing and it's looking really good but the gross majority of the projects look really ugly I must be honest the fonts the professionalism I would recommend that if you're working in word that you use one of the style templates that you don't come up with your own colors for headings purple is a lot of great colorful headings nor is lime green underline good in a report and then the one really important thing which I hope will come out through the peer feedback is coherence between the sections it's clear to me already just by scanning the projects that many groups did not even read each other's work before they put it together I can see that because your font families are different the language that you use is different please pay attention that what is said in each section fits nicely into what is said into the next section there should be a flow and this takes time so I would recommend that before the next deadline you actually have an internal deadline in your group maybe a week before just to give you enough time to read through everything and make sure that it sounds good and it sounds like it fits together all right on to electronic signatures I allowed you to use electronic signature for your cover page and for your meeting minutes in the submission and after going through the meeting minutes I have decided that you are no longer allowed to use that because the gross majority of you are doing it wrong the point of an electronic signature is that it should just be an electronic version of you signing a document when you sign a document the whole point is that you are signing so it's your volition and that you are there in person it should still be mildly believable that you inserted your signature using software like Adobe Acrobat preview or something else and it should be mildly believable that you actually read the document that way that your signature appears on and that you've agreed to its contents now the many creative electronic signatures that I've received in the submission make it very doubtful that you actually that each member actually signed the document and that you all agreed to its contents because the majority of you are submitting completely unbelievable electronic signatures I am no longer allowing it so on the cover page at the end of the semester when you hand in your project you each need to sign the cover page in your own handwriting and then scan that in now I just quickly want to touch again on the meeting minutes what I expect for every single meeting is the date and the time of your meeting where it took place who was in attendance the highlights of the work discussed the decisions made the tasks defined and allocated now with the tasks to find and allocate at the point of meeting minutes is that you actually record who the tasks were allocated to just telling me that tasks were defined and allocated doesn't help you at all when you later need to go back and see who are supposed to do what I also previously required signatures of all in attendance but because of the issues we're having with electronic signatures I'm just going to let that go so it is optional if your group wants to sign your meeting minutes after each meeting it's recommended but it's not required the next assessment that is due is the peer feedback on the drafts that have been submitted and this is due this Friday the 20th of March before 11:59 p.m. if we go back to the study guide you will see that this peer feedback is part of that 50% of your group project if you go to the rubric you'll notice that again this peer feedback count counts 10% you'll get the full 10% if you've submitted meaningful feedback for both of the assigned projects next we're going to look at a step by step guide of how to do the peer feedback for the group project if you go to the discussion tool on click up you'll notice that there is a discussion forum called BSS group project peer feedback it should be available to you by now if you open the forum you'll notice that there are many different threads for different groups you need to scroll down and find your specific group thread so if you are a group of 3 group projects then you are required to this assess the work submitted by both the other groups before Friday if you are in a group of 4 what happened is that one of the groups that either did not submit their project or submit an incomplete draft have been added to a group of three so if you are a group that has submitted your project and it has been marked or assessed as complete then you need to assess the work submitted by the other two groups if you are the group that did not submit a complete draft then you can pick which two of the three drafts you want to give feedback on by Friday the moral of the story is every single group needs to give the feedback on to other groups work how do you give feedback in your thread you can click on reply it'll open the reply box very importantly the first sentence in the reply bloc should say who you are giving feedback for the second sentence should say who you are so feedback given by group 46 if you do not state this four and by it is not possible for us to trace who is giving feedback and therefore we cannot give you marks on clique up you will find the rubric that you need to use for this feedback it's called draft pod a rubric for peer feedback you can complete the rubric in one of two ways firstly with a PDF editor you can just highlight the categories and add little text boxes to say what mark you would have given the group or you can fill it in by hand and then scan it in or take a photo of it you can upload it in any file format although PDF is is definitely preferred then very importantly once you've uploaded the rubric you are still not done you are required to type feedback for each one of the sections meaningful or complete feedback would look something like this example this example is pretty generic because it doesn't refer to any one project you can say something specific like I really like your marketing map haven't you considered adding company XYZ once again we are expecting a comment for every section and then a general comment purpose of these comments is to help the group that you are giving feedback to to improve their work so always keep that in mind it's not only about pointing out the faults but it's also about pointing out where they can improve their work or giving them suggestions and if you think that their work is really fantastic then telling them why you think their work is really good when you are done with the feedback it should look something like this very importantly your first sentences who the feedback is for second sentences who the feedback is by you've given given a comment for each section and a general comment and you've uploaded your rubric be sure to check the box that says post message as anonymous next click Submit this is what your feedback would look like once you're done what will happen after Friday once you've given feedback for two groups on Friday after the deadline the discussion threads will close on Monday the 23rd of March we will reopen the discussion threads but we will lock the thread so that they can we edited or deleted you will then be able to rate the feedback that your group received from the other groups and to say whether it was useful or not remember that to get three out of three for your peer feedback you need to have given meaningful feedback to other groups now this is the opportunity for the group who you gave feedback to to comment on whether your feedback was meaningful and we'll do this using the simple rating option in the discussion board so on Monday the 23rd you go back to your thread and you rate using the stars in the top right corner the meaningfulness of each set of feedback so in this case group 47 is the group for whom the feedback was done and they must complete the rating you either give a one-star rating which is not useful or a 5-star rating which is useful nothing in between we will send out an announcement on Monday to remind you to please do the rating of your feedback so that we can finalize the marks for these two elements of the group project I hope that you find the peer feedback exercise meaningful and that you pick up some good tips to improve your project