COMMUNICATION FOR ENGINEERS PROJECT INSTRUCTIONS DOCUMENT SERIES PROJECT Percentage Weight of Final Grade: 15% STUDENT LEARNING OBJECTIVES • 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 Review the following scenarios, and complete the associated exercises/assignments described in Canvas. 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. As we complete this project, you will likely be asked to produce document drafts for multiple scenarios, but you will only need to select one set/scenario to revise and submit for the final draft of this project. For example, if you create a draft with the three required documents for scenarios 3, 4, and 5, I would only expect you to revise the three documents for one of those scenarios to submit for the final draft of project 1. The first thing I encourage you to do is perform a PADD analysis of each of these 5 scenarios. SCENARIO 1: MaintainU and Outdated Webpages You are the technical manager of a large Internet design firm (100+ employees).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. 1 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 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. DOCUMENTS FOR YOU TO PRODUCE Based on the scenario above, please produce documents for: • Sheila Links,the client at Gateway Industries • Jason Hughes, the president of MaintainU • Nathan Elder, the president of your own firm, an extreme micro-manager Please put all documents in ONE file. SCENARIO 2: Wetlands Restoration and Confused Locals You are the project manager of a civil engineering company, Pathways International. Your current project is a large-scale (100 miles) construction project that is restoring a portion of the wetlands in coastal Louisiana and SE Texas. Currently, you are building a series of temporary access roads so that you can get equipment to one of the low-lying areas. This project involves a literal convoy of heavy trucks. Your firm has received numerous complaints from local residents about the noise and dust. In particular, you’ve received three letters from the same woman, Winnifred Doucette Lejeune. The last letter contained 10 additional signatures. If residents’ complaints continue to escalate, they could slow down the project and put you behind schedule. You make a trip from the office headquarters in Lafayette, LA to the Calcasieu/Sabine Coastal Wetlands Planning, Protection, and Restoration Area to see what’s going on. On site, you see everything seems to progressing fine. Workers are on the job by 7:00am and running until almost sundown, but in the local bar and grill, all the talk is about “the darn government project to nowhere.” When you get back to the office you decide you need to take action. 2 DOCUMENTS FOR YOU TO PRODUCE Based on the scenario above, please produce documents for: • Winnifred Lejeune, local resident and vocal community activist • Richard Smith, Pathways International Vice-President, who asked to be told of “anything that even remotely smells like a problem” with the project. • Arnie Linkous, sub-contractor supervisor at the construction site. Your firm has used this sub-contractor for almost five years, but this is the first project you’ve worked on with this particular supervisor. Please put all documents in ONE file. SCENARIO 3: MRI Data Loss Incident You’re the compliance coordinator for a biomedical company, Hadley Services, which provides field service technicians to local hospitals and medical offices. Hadley’s specialty is radiological equipment, particularly open MRIs. Your primary job is to coordinate the schedules for repair, calibration and preventive maintenance for all of your clients. You are also responsible for writing the reports that keep the company in compliance with local and federal guidelines. Since many medical facilities are starting to replace their outdated MRI machines with the new open MRIs, Hadley has grown considerably in the last 2 years. Hadley has a long standing relationship with the folks at Hitachi Medical, who manufacture the AIRIS Elite, the most commonly used machine in your market. In the early afternoon, you get an email from one of Hadley’s newest clients, St. Francis Clinic, which is a brand new clinic of the Alliance Medical Group. When St. Francis opened two months ago, they signed on with Hadley. The St. Francis account meant a lot to Hadley since they had been wooing the Alliance Medical Group for years. The email is from St. Francis’s clinic administrator, Pat Williams. The technician, Allen Franks, just left after completing a safety check, and now the machine is no longer recording data. You immediately dispatch another, more experienced technician (Marcus Ramirez) to address the problem, and call Ms. Williams. While you’re on the phone with her, Marcus texts you to tell you that problem is solved. You relay the information to Ms. Williams and hang up. After chatting with both technicians, the problem was a simple. Allen Franks had failed to connect the data port snuggly, which is a rookie technician mistake. Now that everything has settled down, you know you have some additional work to do. 3 DOCUMENTS FOR YOU TO PRODUCE Based on the scenario above, please produce documents for: • Pat Williams, the client at St. Francis Clinic • Ronni Simms, Hadley’s client representative who responsible for the St. Francis account letting her know of the developments with her clinic • Allen Franks, Hadley Services technician Please put all documents in ONE file. SCENARIO 4: Pre-Flight Inspection Issue Causes Delay As the quality control supervisor at Aero Coast, you make sure that the structural repairs on wide body passenger and freight aircraft are completed in compliance with all federal regulations. Aero Coast specializes in re-fitting aircraft and they have developed quite a reputation for innovative structural designs. In addition, Aero Coast is known for their attention to detail and finishing projects on time. You and the team have just completed a structural re-design to the interior of a plane that will be used to ship mini-widgets overseas. The re-design focused on customized racking systems to hold the sensitive mini-widgets in place on the long flight. About four hours after the plane has left, you get a text from the pilot. The plane has been grounded in the northeast because of “improper aircraft configuration.” The lens covers on the emergency lighting system are not FAA specified. After a few calls, you find a line mechanic that can make the necessary repairs, but he can’t get there for about 24 hours. You call the client and deliver the bad news--the flight will be delayed by a day. The client, Global Widget Freight, has been with Aero Coast for about three years, and you have a solid business relationship. They account for about 17% of your annual revenue, but they’ve just been bought out. You have some work to do to keep people happy and to make sure this type of problem does not happen again. DOCUMENTS FOR YOU TO PRODUCE Based on the scenario above, please produce documents for: • Carter Buchanan, VP at Global Widget Freight • Bob Gunney, Aero Coast’s inspector who signed off on the completed job • Ned Masters VP of Aero Coast Please put all documents in ONE file. SCENARIO 5: Discriminatory Hiring Practices You are the manager of the Graphics Department at Heartline, Inc., a medium-sized 4 company with three offices and 300 employees that sells a mobile app that monitors customers’ heart function. Your department has recently begun hiring to fill up to eight positions from entry-level to middle-manager. As a department manager, you have been sitting in on the second round of interviews. The first round of interviews, consisting of phone interviews, is solely completed by the Human Resources (HR)department. The second round of interviews consists of Zoom or Teams online meetings with several members of your organization, including yourself, your boss, an employee specialized in the position, and someone from HR. A few weeks into interviewing, you receive a letter from someone named Xaviare Roberts. She is connecting with you from a non-profit organization called Diversity Hiring Help. Ms. Roberts informs you that they have had more than a dozen qualified applicants apply to available positions, but not a single person has been contacted by your HR department. Ms. Roberts explains that each applicant has worked closely with a hiring consultant to perfect their resume and cover letter for your firm’s specific job listing. Additionally, each applicant meets, or exceeds, the required qualifications in your online job posting. Yet, still, not a single person from her organization was contacted for an interview. Ms. Roberts explains her company’s mission is to help people of color find jobs. She suggests that none of her applicants were contacted because they do not possess Caucasian-sounding names. While the first round of interviews is determined by HR, you know that Heartline values diversity in the workplace. As a manager, it is your responsibility to encourage equitable hiring practices. Ms. Roberts’ allegation merits investigation and revision of hiring practices. DOCUMENTS FOR YOU TO PRODUCE Based on the scenario above, please produce documents for: • Ms. Xaviare Roberts at Diversity Hiring Help • The Board of Directors at Heartline • Cynthia Bell-Phlegar, Heartline’s Head of Human Resources (HR) 5 
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