E210/Business and Professional Writing, Dr. Michael O'Conner

[Syllabus] [Assignments/Grading] [Policies and procedures]
Team Group Projects
Group Work: Meetings, Research, Collaborations, and Memo
Proposal
Formal Report: Project Description
Team Work Plans and other Collaborative Forms
Progress Reports
Group Presentation

We've all looked at a local business and thought we could make a service better. Here is your chance to put your observations to work. Imagine that you are a team of consultants hired to boost sales or to reconfigure a particular way of doing things by improving service. You will write a report to a manager of an establishment with the goal of making recommendations for improving overall customer service and, as such, enhancing sales.

Process:

Choose a location, like one of the following locations, the MU bookstore, the MU RTUC Cafeteria, Quizno's in RTUC, the Common Grounds, that serves customers (clear your choice with me- I don't want different groups doing the same location).
Go to the location as a team and observe the service there.
After observing your chosen location, identify some specific ways to make the service better. How could you best meet customers' needs? What will it take to change current service levels/methods, etc?
Interview a manager or employee of the establishment for additional insight into the business.
Design and administer a questionnaire to 10-20 members of your target audience (i.e. specific customers) in order to generate an analysis. This questionnaire should help you to determine what the customers want/need and how could you best meet these needs.
Consider the following questions:
-- What is working well now?
--What could be improved?
--Why is it done the way it is done now?
--What is the main problem?
--How could it be done more efficiently?
--What would it take to change things?

Finally, each team member should find at last one recent article (published within the last five years) that deals with the type of business you are researching--an article on the importance of service or atmosphere in a restaurant, for example. The Library will be helpful in this regard.
Synthesize the information in your report.
As a team, your goal is to discover/synthesize information in order to persuade your corporate audience to take action. Research the possibility of making your process a reality, compile the results, design a proposal, and present your findings/ recommendations to a corporate audience (for the purposes of this report, use my name as the company manager). The final report should be between 8-10 pages (single-spaced), not including appendices.
Present the results of your findings in the appropriate report format.
As part of the process, you will keep your company manager (me) apprised of your progress through the team work plan, progress report, and presentation.
*Include the articles and the completed questionnaires as an appendix to the report*

All sources used in the construction of your formal report should be documented correctly. If you are not clear on how to document something after checking those sources, please ask me. Plagiarism = failure.

Please use the formats explained in your textbook for this assignment.

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Dr.Michael O'Conner
Contact: moconner@mail.millikin.edu, or Click Here