consider yourself lucky

读起来你并不需要别人的建议。你的想法尤其是准备多和老板沟通的计划在我看来都是靠谱的。虎校长已经强调了沟通的重要性。我来帮你猜猜你老板的想法。

Being a manager is a hard job. Recruiting is a full time job. It is hard to find someone with good attitude and can get things done. Sometimes a bad appple is hired; sometimes good employee leave for greener pasture. Your boos seems be to reasonable and would like to make the situation work even though you are not fully meeting his expectations. A non-essential short-term project is easier for performance measurement.Those are usually set up for two purposes,documentation for employee peformance (peformance improvement plan, or PIP) or employee skills development plan.PIP is necessary for firing an employee, so employee has to be notified and agree before it can start.It doesn't looks like you were on that.It seems your boss wants you to be successful, otherwise he could just get rid of you when the probation period ended.Your boss might not be great in communicating his expectations to you but he seems to be trying very hard.It is a good opportunity for you to learn how to be a good employee on a small team.You have a good plan, stick with it and you will learn a lot no matter how it turns out.

One thing you might want to consider is to tell your boss that you appreciate him trying to make it work. Tell him you are thankful for all the things he tried. Let him know you are very confident you can be an asset for the company and you are motivated to make it work for him and mostly for yourself too.That way his effort is at least validated by you even he might not getting all the results he wanted yet.That ought encourage him to try harder.