Mid-Project Design Review

Overview

The Mid-Project Design Review is a forum for your team to tell others what you have been doing. The review provides an opportunity for your team to obtain feedback on your progress and plans. It also gives you an opportunity to hone your formal presentation skills. Finally, the review is where your team can be evaluated for a mid-course grade. Consult the schedule posted on the course web site for day and time of your presentation.

Here is how to approach the reviews. Assume the audience is technically competent, but that they are not familiar with your project. Thus, the presentation should contain the following:

1. a well-defined problem statement that is put in context (i.e. the why),
2. a summary of what work has occured to date and
3. a concise description of where the work is going and what you will deliver at the end of the project (be specific).

Here's how to impress the audience with your project:

1. demonstrate that you have followed a good design process,
2. demonstrate that you fully understand the problem you are working on,
3. demonstrate that you have used your engineering sciences background (e.g. the theory and the equations) to help ensure a sensible design.

Be confident of your work, and please, no apologies!

The "Oral Presentation Workshop" lecture should give you many ideas for how to structure your presentation, format your visual aids and direct your delivery.

This is a formal presentation and you are expected to use professional presentation tools, in this case Microsoft PowerPoint to create your slides. Your PowerPoint files will be loaded onto our computer for presentation. You are not allowed to use your own laptop, as changing from one computer to another will take too much time. Please save your presentation file in a format that will work on PowerPoint Version 2003, which will simplify running on older laptops. More information on preparing your presentation is provided below.

You are encouraged to bring any prototypes you have constructed, but if you plan to demo a prototype, make sure the demo can be seen from the last row of the classroom.

Each team member should plan to speak for approximately 5 minutes. The exact time allotted for your presentation is available from the schedule posted on the course web site. You must allow 7 minutes at the end of your presentation for questions and answers. As a group, you should police yourselves to stay on time. We suggest that you appoint one member of the group as a timekeeper and develop an unobtrusive way to give people the hook if they run over their time.

The presentation should be cohesive and integrated and not simply a collection of individual speakers. Please spend time as a group preparing. You should do a timed, dress rehearsal of your presentation at least one day before the real show because ractice makes perfect. While you won't be graded on the way you dress, dressing at the same level is important (e.g. don't mix blue jeans with suit coats). "Business casual" is recommended.

You will be evaluated on your presentation as a team, as well a your individual delivery skills. The evaluators will be the project advisors and course instruction staff who are present plus many of your peers who are present.

The evaluation criteria are essentially:

• Your progress on the design so far.
• Your plan for completing your project by the end of the semester.
• Your visuals and delivery.

For more information on the evaluation criteria, look at the scoring form used by the judges which is posted in the "Forms" section of the ME4054 web site.

You are required to review the teams prior to and following your own team on the afternoon of your presentation. If you a member of the first team presenting for the day, please evaluate the two teams following you; if you are a member of the last team, please evaluate the two teams prior to you.

Presentation Technology

Save your presentation file as a PowerPoint 2003 file. Email the file to the course TA in charge of the presentations, or bring in person to the TA on a memory stick. Either way, get confirmation from the TA that your presentation was indeed received.

The TA must have your media in his or her hands by 12 noon the day before your presentation. If they don't, you don't have a presentation.

One option is to drop your media in the TA's mailbox located in the mailroom in MechE 1101. (If you do this, you need to get confirmation from the TA that he or she picked it up.) Note that, "I could not find the TA", or "Gee, I dropped it in the mailbox", is no excuse, it's up to you to do whatever it takes to get that media to the TA.

The TA will load your file and all the other files for the day onto the laptop that will be used for the presentation. The TA will take care of getting your title slide up on the screen just before your presentation starts so that you can be up and running with a minimum amount of fuss.

If you have embedded movies or sounds (not recommended), you'll want to consult with the TA, and do a trial run 48 hours (minimum) in advance to confirm everything runs OK on our laptop.

This is as close to a professional presentation as possible. You are being treated as the professional. Professionals do not make excuses and do not blame the equipment. Don't discover that your fancy PowerPoint^® embedded movie/sound/animation/whatever does not run during your presentation: that's your tough luck. The moral of this story is: check out your technology in advance (or avoid overly risky technology).

Tips on your presentation

Based upon experienced gained by viewing hundreds of ME4054 mid-project presentations, here are a few things the ME4054 instructors would like you to consider so that your presentation will be successful.

• Start by concisely explaining your the problem you are trying to solve.
  • What are you trying to do and why?
  • What is the background to the problem and what is the need that your design will satisfy?
  • Who is your design for?
  • What will your design do?
  • What is wrong with the current way of doing things?
  • Photos of current products or photos that show where your design will go are helpful for setting the scene.
• Demonstrate that you understand the needs of the customer.
  • Who will be the primary users of your product? (Be as specific as you can).
  • Who are your secondary customers?
  • What you have done to determine what your customers want?
  • What are the most important customer needs that you have identified?

• Convince the faculty sitting in the audience that you have learned some engineering science in your undergraduate mechanical engineering coursework and that you know how to apply it to advantage in your project. Show them you are able to take the theory and equations that you learned from lectures and textbooks and exploit them for your design problem.

  You want to take this tip seriously for two reasons. First, good engineering analysis will always produce a better design faster. Second, the only way for your team to receive a high grade in this course is by using analysis to drive the design. (Point two is a result of point one.) You need to be capable of more than inefficient "build and break" design to meet the requirements of our curriculum.

• Present the most important entries in your product requirements document. Explain the "why's" behind the requirements.
• Convince the audience that you have explored the total possible solution space for your product. Demonstrate that a truly novel solution could not have been overlooked. You won't be able to show all of the 100 designs generated during your concept generation phase, but quickly show us the most interesting examples.
• Show us your selection chart to prove to us that your choice(s) are the best possible choice(s). Prove that your evaluation of the specifications is realistic by defending it with competitive benchmarking.
• Devote at least 5 minutes of your talk to presenting your plan for completing the project over the remainder of the semester. Your technical milestones are at least as important as your managerial plan.
  • What are your largest technical risks and how do you plan to overcome them?
  • Will you construct prototypes? If so, what is their purpose and what form will they take?
  • Describe any experiments you plan to conduct.
  • Describe the analyses that you expect to perform over the second half of the semester.
• Provide evidence that your project is being controlled by a good management process. This means that you convince the audience you are
  1. following good design process,
  2. using the people on your team effectively, and
  3. governing your process.
  Gantt charts are difficult to read at a distance. Nevertheless, you might show:
  1. The highlights of your project calendar.
  2. Your project milestones.
  3. The highest level of your task organization.
  4. A sample of your task structure which clearly demonstrates your thoughtful utilization of available resources.
  5. If appropriate, a summary of the key materials, supplies and resources needed for completing your project.
  6. If your plan includes prototyping, convince the audience that you have built time into your plan to not only build the prototypes, but also to integrate the results from the prototypes into your final design.
  7. Convince your management that you have allowed sufficient time for documenting your design.
• Clearly state what you expect to deliver at the end of the project. The audience should leave confident that you will achieve your design objectives.
• Cite your sources.
  • If you have a graphic on your slides that you downloaded from the web or scanned from print media, include the source in a small font just below the graphic. Otherwise, people in the audience will think the graphic is yours.
  • If you present a fact, cite the source so that the audience can assess the quality of the source.
• Make professional graphics.
  • Simplify.
    • How many words can you remove from your slide and still make your point?
    • Communicate a single, clear idea on each slide.
    • Use keywords or phrases instead of sentences.
  • Put a title on every slide and have the title be meaningful. A good test is to confirm that the title is specific to your project and could not be used by other projects.
  • Put an eye-catching image, that is relevant to the project, on your title slide.
  • Strive to include a meaningful image on every slide. (Graphics convey more information than text. They also capture the attention of your audience.)
  • Ensure your slides are clearly readable from the back of the room.
    • Use large fonts
    • Be sure that you can read the axes of your graphs. (And be sure the axes are labeled.)
    • Make figures and drawings large, simple and clear. Use bold lines in your figures.
    • Include no more than six lines of text.
    • Limit the length of each line to no more than 45 characters.
  • Don't distract your audience with unnecessary use of software features (such as rotating titles).

Presentation checklist

• ____ State what you are working on and why (background, mission)
• ____ Identify customers
• ____ Summarize key customer requirements
• ____ Review critical specifications (highlights of PDS)
• ____ Demonstrate full exploration of solution space
• ____ Defend concept selection
• ____ Demonstrate exploitation of modeling & analysis
• ____ Present technical plan for completing project
• ____ Review schedule and resources
• ____ Clarify deliverables