I’m stuck on a Communications question and need an explanation.
LEARNING OBJECTIVE • Write for a specific purpose and audience •
Create various forms of business correspondence and documents •
Develop effective business correspondence writing style, paying particular attention to concision (i.e., avoiding wordiness), paragraph construction, and tone
ASSIGNMENT Choose one of the following scenarios, and produce the requested documents for one scenario only. Each scenario asks you to prepare a range of documents. Students are responsible for determining the appropriate genre (email, memo, business letter, etc.) as well as the content of those documents
SCENARIO 1 You are the technical manager of a large Internet design firm (100+ employees). One of your primary responsibilities is to manage a team of developers. Your unit’s primary goal is to build and deliver custom web applications and to update client websites. Due to the increase of information delivery via company intranets, your company has grown has grown considerably. About 8 months ago you hired a small start-up company, MaintainU, to perform routine maintenance for clients’ websites because you needed to focus more attention on the custom applications. MaintainU does not interact with your clients and they work as sub-contractors through your company. Your clients are not aware of this move and for now, you and Nathan Elder, your company president, want to keep it this way.
The last several months you have had problems with MaintainU not paying attention to version dates. They have, on several occasions, made changes requested by clients, but they also uploaded old pages to the site. Having dealt with a number of complaints, the most recent two weeks ago, you had a long conversation with Jason Hughes, the president of MaintainU, that mistakes are not
2
acceptable.
Now, this morning, you receive an angry call from a client, Sheila Links at Gateway Industries, because an executive that was fired two months ago has been added back to the executive page. Gateway Industries was one of the first clients your firm ever signed. While the client is on the phone, the mistake is corrected, and you end up setting up a meeting for lunch next week.
For the first 6 months or so, the relationship with MaintainU was great. At this point, you’re uncertain if you want to continue the relationship, but at the same time, you cannot afford to bring maintenance work back in-house. Apparently, the phone call to Jason wasn’t enough. DELIVERABLES Based on the scenario above, your deliverables will be the following documents: • document to the client, Gateway Industries • document to MaintainU • document to the president, who is a micro-manager and likes to know everything that is going on
SCENARIO 1 You are the technical manager of a large Internet design firm (100+ employees). One of your primary responsibilities is to manage a team of developers. Your unit’s primary goal is to build and deliver custom web applications and to update client websites. Due to the increase of information delivery via company intranets, your company has grown has grown considerably. About 8 months ago you hired a small start-up company, MaintainU, to perform routine maintenance for clients’ websites because you needed to focus more attention on the custom applications. MaintainU does not interact with your clients and they work as sub-contractors through your company. Your clients are not aware of this move and for now, you and Nathan Elder, your company president, want to keep it this way.
The last several months you have had problems with MaintainU not paying attention to version dates. They have, on several occasions, made changes requested by clients, but they also uploaded old pages to the site. Having dealt with a number of complaints, the most recent two weeks ago, you had a long conversation with Jason Hughes, the president of MaintainU, that mistakes are not
2
acceptable.
Now, this morning, you receive an angry call from a client, Sheila Links at Gateway Industries, because an executive that was fired two months ago has been added back to the executive page. Gateway Industries was one of the first clients your firm ever signed. While the client is on the phone, the mistake is corrected, and you end up setting up a meeting for lunch next week.
For the first 6 months or so, the relationship with MaintainU was great. At this point, you’re uncertain if you want to continue the relationship, but at the same time, you cannot afford to bring maintenance work back in-house. Apparently, the phone call to Jason wasn’t enough. DELIVERABLES Based on the scenario above, your deliverables will be the following documents: • document to the client, Gateway Industries • document to MaintainU • document to the president, who is a micro-manager and likes to know everything that is going on