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Work Plan

Officially, the FYP starts in the Fall semester. However, you may begin anytime once you have a well-defined topic. I would prefer that you talk to me at least once a month or at least send me an email to discuss your progress. The main purpose of this is so that I can provide you with some guidance and directions.

There are a few key milestones for the FYP. The exact schedule for these milestones will vary from year to year, so please check with the FYP Course Examiner for details.

The Proposal
The Progress Report
The Presentation
The Demo
The Final Report

The Proposal

The initial 1 or 2 paragraph proposal you used to sign up for FYP is probably insufficient for real work. You might want to first discuss with me what you want to learn and do and then formulate a detailed description, plan, and schedule. The FYP Course Examiner should have sample guidelines and templates on what a proposal should look like. In any case, your proposal should have a section to introduce what you want to achieve in the FYP. Please remember that the FYP must have a learning component; you must do some independent research as part of the FYP. Just writing a program using techniques everyone knows is not interesting. The proposal should also outline the technologies you are planning to study and use. It should also explain how you plan to achieve your FYP objectives and the tasks you will perform. Most importantly, you should have a tentative schedule to ensure your project gets done within the allocated duration. Also, remember to change the project title if needed.

If you do not have a Proposal/Project Plan template from your department, you can consider using the following as your document outline:

Title Page - change title if necessary.
Objectives - One or two paragraphs on what you plan to achieve in your project. Remember, these are the project objectives, not your own personal study objectives.
Background - One or two pages to introduce the project, provide background, etc. For example, what others have done before. List similar applications/solutions and/or research projects. Also list all the key tasks that you will be performing.
Technology/Research - One or two pages to explain what technologies you plan to use/study, system architecture if you have one, list relevant papers and web sites, data set you plan to use, etc. It is important that you use realistic data to test your programs.
Performance - How do you plan to evaluate and test your program? How do you measure whether you have achieve your objectives and done a good job?
Plan - Use MS Project or MS Visio to draw a project plan with tasks and milestones.

The Proposal should be completed within the first few weeks in the Fall/Semester A.

The Progress/Interim Report

The Progress/Interim Report is usually submitted early Spring semester to both the supervisor and your assessor. It should outline what you have done during the Fall semester, which should be the majority of your work. By then, you should have finished all the background research and documented it. You should have finished the design of your system and have started on implementation. The Progress Report should be very similar to the Final Report in terms of content. The only difference is that it will be missing the implementation details as well as results from testing.

The Progress Report should be completed early in the Spring semester or Semester B.

The Presentation

The FYP Presentation is an important event. So you should be as prepared as possible. Although there are no fixed guidelines on the format or content, the following are typical flows for the presentation:

Problem Statement - what is the problem you are solving, why this problem is interesting and important, why is it challenging
Technical Background - research you have done, what others have done before, what is missing in their approach, put your work in context of the current market
Your Contributions - your main work, your approach, the architecture, the technologies used, etc., why it is good or better than others
Your Program/Application - ideally you can give a very short "live" demo (you should check if the presentation PC is networked and try the demo on the actual presentation PC before your presentation), if no live demo, you must have screen dumps, statistics on performance, etc.
Summary - what are your main contributions, what have you accomplished (this is the time you can help the accessors by listing reasons why they should give you an "A")

It is important to remember that your presentation should be understandable by anyone even non-technical people! We want you to be professionals that know how to communicate your engineering ideas to managers who might not necessarily be very technical.

Good presentation skills are just as important as good technical content! Therefore, you should paid attention to the overall flow and organization of the presentation, your timing and of course your English. Remember to dress business-like and don't forget to smile. If you are not comfortable talking in front of people, you should get a few friends together and use one of the class rooms to practice.

You can also click here on hints for presentation skills.

The Presentations are usually held mid-Spring semester.

The Demo

Your program/application must really work in order to pass the FYP! This is also the opportunity to impress us with what you have done and must importantly learned. The application features are not as important as the technologies you used and the design as well as the architecture. You should spend some time explaining these instead of going through your program feature by feature.

The Demo should be done before the finals in the Spring semester.

The Final Report

The FYP Course Examiners would probably provide you with an outline or template of what is expected from your Final Report. You can also take a look at the sample reports I have posted in this Web site. The Final Report should include things you have reported in the Progress Report, plus the final design of your system, implementation details, results from testing, and a conclusion.

The Final Report is usually handed in before the finals in the Spring semester.

Last modified: Tuesday, 30-Sep-2003 16:23:35 HKT

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