Excel CFE

Hi everyone thanks again for watching I try to make weekly accounting videos so please subscribe so you don't miss anything and give this video a thumbs up if you like what you see today we're going to be talking about capstone 1 essentials it's not a clickbait that I wrote watch this for a 99.99 pass rate as I'm going to explain to you why later as you might find today this video is a little bit more colourful than usual and that's because I'm trying to incorporate the theme of 2022 may capstone 1 case on creative toys incorporated so now let's talk about the overview for today it's going to be talking about what is capstone 1 it's going to be giving you tips on the part 1 2 and 3 of the report and then tips on the board presentation and lastly i'll explain how to get the 99.99 pass rate so now let's talk about what is capstone one capstone one is a pass or fail case analysis where you usually work for a company as an employee or a consultant for them it's focused on enabling competencies and not technical in general it's going to just feel like you're doing a management project in university and it's going to be mainly focused on your performance management skills rather than accounting tax finance and assurance you will probably encounter as much technical as a core one case these projects are expected to be completed in groups of four to six candidates if you have a smaller group don't take it as a disadvantage as it might be easier to coordinate schedules and to get along with your group members the average case size is about 50 pages with appendices you get two live chat calls with your facilitator who's the one that marks your reports so they'll be able to give you feedback and you'll be able to ask them questions there's gonna be three deliverables your part one your part two and your part three of the report and then there's gonna be a final board presentation where you get to present your report to the board so now let's talk about some tips on your part one of capstone one the first would be that you want to be on time and committed to your team you don't want to be that guy that's always late to the meetings the second tip is that you should have an agenda going into each meeting and you should have deliverables prior to the next meeting so you're not just having meetings for the sake of meetings next you would want to have recurring meeting times so that everyone knows exactly when they're supposed to meet and keeps that time slot free if there are any parts of the deliverables that you're having issues with then you should always voice up your opinions as soon as possible and not wait until the last minute when you have to submit the report when dividing out the work you should do a rough allocation of how many pages each person needs to write before they start because you'll realize that the page limit creeps up on you pretty quickly prior to handing in any of your reports make sure you double check with the page limit in the format and i'll have a slide on this later in the video you should always designate one person to submit the deliverables because you don't want to be the team where everyone thinks that everyone else will submit and in the end no one submits lastly whether or not you have a revision for part one you should always revise your work based on the feedback and the marking key as the information is still fresh in your head and then you don't have to wait until part three before you start revising everything now let's talk about tips for part two so you want to follow the instructions of what you need to hand in for the deliverables it's clearly outlined to you every week so if you follow that you should be okay it's also easier to cut down than to write more so it's okay if you're over the page limit by one or two pages you'll just cut down afterwards you would also want to have a buddy system where you assign two people to one area to have more accountability and to be able to have someone check over the other person's work if conflicts arise make sure you're able to compromise as much as you can if it's not too much trouble the hardest part of capstone one is the team dynamics so you want to keep the relationship as good as possible for yourself and others around you when making the questions for your facilitator you just get three as a group so check with the cpa forum to see if your question has already been answered so that you don't waste the time of your facilitator and you can ask other questions instead your facilitator can only comment on what you did so they won't be able to tell you the answers no matter how many times you ask them also you want to use up the full 30 minutes to get feedback from your facilitator if they have answered the three questions that you had and there's still time left you should come prepared with extra questions that you can ask them lastly you want to provide honest feedback of teammates so that your facilitator can help you resolve any issues these feedback are going to be anonymous so that your teammates won't know who said it so now let's talk about tips for part three again you want to make sure you know the page limit and the format requirements in addition you want to make sure that you're only submitting your final report as you're only allowed one submission you want to make sure that there's no further updates after that because if there is you'll have to actually email your facilitator before the submission deadline and ask them to take down the previous submission so that you can resubmit again if you realized after the submission deadline that you uploaded the wrong copy there's actually nothing your facilitator can do about it which is similar to any other module that you've been in the next tip is that there's no revisions for your part three so make sure you're handing in in your best work and the next tip is to remember that you want to include any revisions that you've had in part one and part two regardless of if you actually needed revisions because sometimes you could have passed even if you left out some key points however you don't want to leave out those key points when it reaches your part three it's also a good idea to have someone to be able to read through the whole report and to have a good flow and to make sure that everything is cohesive maybe this person would be allocated a little bit less for their area so that they can do this proofreading lastly if you get to pass part three you should trust in the mark that you received from your facilitator and be confident in the recommendation that you're going to be presenting to the board and not try to question if you got the right or wrong answer especially if you ask other groups and they recommended something that's different from yours so now let's talk about tips for your board presentation you are not marked on the content that you're presenting so trust in the facilitator that they have set you up for success and that you have the right recommendation and analysis the next point is to focus on your presentation skills as that's what you're going to be evaluated on if you remember back to your capstone 1 module workshop you all have the oral presentation rubric that the panel will be using to assess you in addition you should be prepared for the q a session you can have extra slides of things that you have made for the appendix of part 3 which you might not have necessarily shown in your presentation but you can flip to if there's a question later asked about it this will show the board that you are well prepared next make sure that prior to starting your presentation you do a video and mic check so that no one is on mute and everyone can hear each other in addition everyone should be keeping time so you know how much time the previous person took so that if you need to speed up your part of the presentation you can do so you don't want a situation where everyone takes a little bit more time than they're supposed to and the last person is left with 30 seconds to talk about the recommendation and conclusion when doing the q a you shouldn't add on to your teammates answers and you want to trust whoever answers first to give a complete response bonds make sure you always have slide numbers when you present as the board members don't normally remember the title of the slides but they remember which number it was on to show teamwork you want to make sure that everyone on your team presents and has a chance to answer the questions it's okay to not know a question sometimes the panel member is from the industry that they can based on so they might know some additional knowledge that you might not so it's okay if what they're asking you is not inside the case you're allowed to say that you don't know but you will get back to them afterwards in general you just want to be confident in what you know because the board members probably only read the case and solutions once while you've been working on this for eight weeks lastly you just want to be professional and play the part make sure that you address the board as the board or by their role don't say you guys and be informal even if the presentations are online try to address your part so you should wear business formal you should also coordinate or coordinate with your teammates so that you're not the only one in business formal while everyone else is in business casual it's better to overdress than to underdress i've also had candidates show up in hoodies so you don't actually want to be that person either formatting is key in capstone 1. i've highlighted what you really need to take note of which is the word count and page limit for appendices in addition you will notice that the size of the margins are typically the default margins that you would have in word so if you haven't changed them you would be okay lastly there is a requirement on the type of font and the size of font that you can actually use so now let's talk about why 99.99 of people watching this video will pass capstone 1. the answer is pretty simple there's revision opportunities for part one and part two which the facilitator will give you back your mark plus the marking key which clearly shows what you actually missed so as long as your team looks at the marking key and the feedback they will be able to see what they missed for example the marking key will explicitly say that you didn't do a swot analysis so what do teams do they put in a swot analysis next time however you might say there's no revision on the part 3 so won't students fail there well the answer is not really because by the time you do your part one and part two you have the right situational analysis you have the right strategic and operational issues in their analysis so the recommendation should be very clear lastly even at the oral presentation stage if you mess up on the presentation you'll even get a repeat on that as well so basically what i'm trying to say is that if you do your part and you work as a group you won't fail having said that capstone 1 is still going to be a lot of work but don't worry if you trust in the process and put in the amount of hours you'll get rewarded in the end in all my years of being involved with capstone 1 i have not heard of anyone failing the report and only heard of one team failing the presentation because they were arguing with each other in front of the panel while presenting however they got a second chance and was able to redo it and passed in the end this is why i believe that 99.99 of people watching this video will actually eventually pass capstone one and hopefully you'll be one of them as well to give you guys the complete picture here's the passing profile for the individual as well in summary it's basically if you contribute to the group you hand in all your individual assignments you attend the workshop and the facilitator meetings then you'll pass as well as always thanks again for watching  i try to make videos every week so if you like what you see please subscribe and like the video, if you have not already hopefully this video helped you feel more confident going into the capstone one feel free to leave me a comment and I'll try my best to reply.