Project Exploration and Plan
Purpose
This milestone is designed to help your team develop an evidence-based understanding of the project before committing to technical solutions.
The report you create should become part of your project’s living documentation and serve as the foundation for future milestones, reports, presentations, and community partner communications.
Before beginning, review the Milestone Roadmap.
Deliverables
Submit a single report containing the following sections.
1. Project Overview
Introduce the project and provide any context needed for a reader to understand the problem being addressed, the community partner’s interests, and the expected outcomes of the project.
2. Project Exploration
Explore and document the resources currently available to your team.
Depending on the project, this may include data, documents, images, software, workflows, research literature, simulations, databases, survey responses, or other project-specific resources.
Use examples, figures, tables, screenshots, visualizations, schemas, or other evidence to communicate what you learned. The goal is not to perform a complete analysis. The goal is to develop an informed understanding of your project’s starting point.
This section should help answer the question:
What do we currently know about the project and its available resources?
3. Success Criteria and Evaluation
Describe how your team will determine whether the project is making meaningful progress and how success will be evaluated.
Success criteria should be connected to project goals, community partner needs, and expected outcomes. When appropriate, describe what will be measured, why it matters, and what outcome would be considered successful.
Some success criteria may still be uncertain at this stage. If so, identify them as open loops and explain how your team plans to refine them.
4. Project Plan
Using what you learned during project exploration, describe your proposed approach for the semester.
Your plan should identify major goals, anticipated milestones, team responsibilities, deliverables, workflows, tools, and technologies. Explain how the plan supports your success criteria and addresses the needs of the project.
Teams are encouraged to review upcoming course milestones and identify work that may require preparation before those milestones become due.
5. Open Loops
Identify important open loops that could affect project success.
For each open loop, describe:
- What is currently unknown
- Why it matters
- How the team plans to reduce the uncertainty
- When the team expects to revisit or resolve it
Refer to the Course Milestone Roadmap for additional discussion of open loops and their role in project planning.
6. Reflection
Reflect on what your team learned during the exploration process.
Discuss how exploration influenced your understanding of the project, your assumptions, your project plan, or your definition of success.
Effective Use of AI
AI tools may be used to support writing, coding, analysis, visualization, brainstorming, and organization.
However, AI should not replace project exploration, decision making, or critical thinking.
Strong reports emphasize evidence rather than volume. Figures, tables, examples, observations, schemas, data bibliographies, and project-specific insights are generally more valuable than lengthy narrative text.
Reports that are repetitive, generic, or disconnected from the team’s actual project work may receive lower evaluations regardless of writing quality.
Connection to Future Milestones
This report should serve as the foundation for future project work.