Project 3: Recommendation Report Outline

In Project 3’s recommendation report , you’ll analyze the field research you did, developing findings (issues you have discovered about the current system, particularly its problems) and recommendations (ways to address those issues).

Whereas Project 2’s interim report allowed you to “eyeball” the field data and speculate about your findings, Project 3’s recommendation report should be firmly based on the analysis you’ve done through your analytical models. You’ve examined systemic issues, getting beyond the symptoms to diagnose the disease, the explanation of why these symptoms occur. Once you can identify the disease, you can recommend a good, coherent treatment.

So here’s how you’ll do it.

Introduction

In this first section, remind us that you’re following up on the interim report. You studied the site, you analyzed the issues, and now you’re prepared to discuss systemic issues and recommend an approach for dealing with them.

Methods

Here, remind us that you used the models mentioned in the P3 assignment sheet. List them and give a brief (1-2 sentence) explanation of each.

Findings (or: Systemic Issues)

Here, discuss what you found. Start with how you summed up the issues – your CDB tables. You’ll have at least one CDB table, probably more. Each one represents a systemic issue.

For instance, take a look at Tracing Genres Ch.5. Here, you see some CDB tables in which contradictions, discoordinations, and breakdowns have been related, showing how they are all part of the same problem. If you were to write a Findings section based on these tables, each table would represent a different finding.

For each finding, draw on each model to give evidence for the finding. For instance, if one finding is that GIS-ALAS’ representations are incompatible, you might

• Show with an ASD and AND that the representations come from two separate activities
• Show with your GEM that people are using unofficial texts to help them work between the two representations
• Show with your CEM that people regularly have to relate the two representations to get work done
• Show with your STG that although people use a lot of different workarounds, they all do basically the same thing – they fit the same niche
• Show with your operations table that they frequently encounter breakdowns, across all participants, when they try to relate the representations – and that they find different ways to recover

Use a subheading for each finding so that readers can find them easily.

Recommendations

Recommendations flow directly from your findings. Every time you identify a systemic problem, identify a recommendation (or set of recommendations) to deal with it. And remember, you’re addressing the system (the disease) rather than surface issues (the symptoms). No aspirin, no band-aids, but a treatment.

Use a subhead for each recommendation so we can find it and see how it answers the finding. Be prepared to show how each recommendation will translate into changes at the different levels (e.g., easing the strategic contradiction, remediating the tactical-level discoordinations, eliminating the breakdowns or allowing people to recover from those breakdowns more quickly).