On Campus Internship Project Definition Working with a sponsor company to define the deliverables of an On Campus Internship and create an engagement letter

Has Your Team Been Formed? Do you have weekly scheduled team meeting times? Have you met as a team to discuss the project description and key deliverables? Have you assigned team roles? Have you contacted your company sponsor? Have you scheduled a kickoff meeting time and location? Have you scheduled weekly meeting times with your company sponsor? Have you input this information on the Key Contacts page of My Projects?

Project Definition: What's the big deal – Just Do It! They told you what they want, what are you wasting time for – just do what they said. NOT! In communicating the project deliverables from the sponsoring company to the field study team, there are only two things of which you can be certain: What ever they were thinking of when they wrote the description is not what you are thinking of as you read it What ever they asked for is not going to be what they need

What ever they were thinking of when they wrote the description is not what you are thinking of as you read it People communicate based on the sum total of their experiences and cultural understanding They have a picture in their head and they try and encode a series of words to recreate that picture. The person hearing the description of the picture tries to decode the words to see a picture in their mind. They will use the sum total of their experiences and cultural understanding to decode the words The likelihood the picture they create in their mind from the words they decode being the same as the sender is small.

How big is a tree? Palm Bonsai Redwood and Fir

What ever they asked for is not going to be what they need They submitted their project 2 weeks to 10 months ago, much could have changed in that time. They may have spent 15 minutes to 1 hour in creating the project definition. This project may be a very small part of all of the things they are doing. You will spend about 700 hours as a team working on this project, you will think about these things much more. They were probably thinking about tasks, we are going to have you add value by thinking about decisions!

Identifying the Decisions and Deliverables Obtain project idea from sponsor. Why do they want to do the project? What decisions will they make or what actions will they take? Will the project give them everything they need? If not, what else do they need? Can they make a decision with the added project elements or take action? Continue to cycle by adding project elements until a decision can be made or an action can be taken. Describe the decision to be made or action to be taken. List the deliverables to be provided by the team to facilitate the decision or action. Build the scope and deliverables into the engagement letter

The Engagement Letter Use the information developed in the project description to create an engagement letter The engagement letter should contain a meeting of the minds that was developed throughout the process The project descriptions, fees, deliverables, work plan elements, timeline and meeting schedules should all be included in the engagement letter The dialogue to this point should have created a relatively shared vision of the picture seen by both the sponsoring company and the field study team Submit the engagement letter to the sponsor