CS486 - Senior Capstone Design
Guidelines for Team Inventory

Overview

The first task for a newly-formed team is to take an inventory of what talents exist on the team...and what gaps there might be in the team's capabilities that one should think about planning to fill. On a more personal side, it's nice to get to know a little more the team members, including some hobbies or special interests. This all has several purposes:

For the client

This packet of information will provide the client with a preliminary overview of the team working on the project. This will allow the client to better understand what the team's strengths and weaknesses are, and how he/she can best support the team.

For the team

This provides the team with some knowledge of its collective strengths and weaknesses. Clearly, this information will be instrumental in individual task assignments, project selection, negotiating project specifications, establishing design philosophy and strategy, project scheduling, and overall project management.

The Assignment

Each team must create a Team Inventory document with the following format and contents:

1. Cover Page. All cover pages for hardcopy deliverables should have the title of the document, the date, the team name, the project sponsor, the team's faculty mentor, and list of team members. A team logo is nice, once you have developed one. Create a nice one once, and you can use it all year.
2. Intro. In this case, you can add this to the bottom of the cover page because it's short; just call it "Overview" and then intro the document, i.e., "The purpose of this team inventory document is to briefly introduce the members of our team. The following pages briefly outline the training, skills, and relevant experience of each team member."
3. The meat. Now you develop a single page intro for each team member...sort of like a condensed resume. Should include:
   • Biographical info: Up top it has the name, as well as things like major, and hometown. As well as your professional photo at top right.
   • Education: List your high school. Only list your high school GPA if it was above 3. Next list all of the institutions you've studies at (might only be NAU) and, for each, list 1-3 *most relevant* upper-division (300 level and above) courses taken there. "Relevant" obviously means "could have value on this project".
   • Work experience: Bullet out work or internship experiences that you've had *that are relevant to a technical project*. For each, include a short sentence saying what you did there, e.g., "Internships at Google. Contributed to team developing database back-end for YouTube". You working at Dairy Queen over the summer is not relevant; technical stuff only!
   • Skills: Now bullet out any special skills that you gained along the way. For each, be sure to add a short sentence that indicates where you got the skills and gives a basis for knowing how extensive your knowledge is.
   • Other interests: Here you have some freedom to say a little something personal about yourself, a few things that you are passionate about or that you think will help people understand the person that you are.

Be sure that all of the pages for the individuals in the team are formatted similarly. A good approach here is for one person to draft their page, then all discuss it and improve content, layout and style; then everyone edits that one to paste in their own info.

Deliverables

Professionally presented document, in hardcopy, at the due date.