Percentage Weight of Final Grade: 10-20%
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
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 have been an employee for almost two years with Innovative Residential Solutions, a firm
that provides support services for design and construction of residential and commercial
buildings, and other types of infrastructure. One of your company’s specialties is innovative
security features for multi-use facilities, such as keyless entry for residents.
Innovative Residential Solutions has just released a new sensor that needs to be installed at a
number of buildings the company holds maintenance contracts for across town. The new sensors
update residential entry points so that the resident’s key fobs are functional at a greater distance.
You have been tasked with your first big project. You are to coordinate the replacement of old
sensors with the newly designed ones. Coordinating with your team, you provide all the
necessary parts to do the work. The first stage of replacements–five buildings with 20
replacement points–was completed, but you received a call from the management of those
buildings because residents are reporting they cannot enter the building.
You get in touch with the person who did the replacement, Hagen Smith, and send him back over
to troubleshoot. He lets you know that it was the sensor. The new sensors were not properly
calibrated. Hagen Smith was able to recalibrate the sensors, and resident’s entry problems were
resolved.
Upon further research, you are able to locate the cause of the problem. At the Research &
Development (R&D) warehouse, a new employee mis-read the sensor labels, resulting in
inaccurate instructions for sensor installation being circulated to your installment team.
Now you have to take steps to ensure the problem does not happen again.
DOCUMENT SERIES PROJECT INSTRUCTIONS
DELIVERABLES • Correspondence to Levi Kouma, the manager of the buildings where the mistake was
found.
• Correspondence to Ahsan Trevino, the manager of the R&D unit
• Correspondence to your supervisor, Mica Reyes, to let them know what happened
SCENARIO 2
You are the project manager of a civil engineering company. 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. Although the project is environmentally beneficial, the local community has taken
issue with the inconvenience of heavy construction in its midst.
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 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.
The majority of the community is a minority population that identifies as Cajun, many of which
are of low socioeconomic status. In the letters from the community, residents assert that they are
being discriminated against because their opinion was not solicited regarding the construction. In
fact, in going through project records, it appears residents were not consulted as the project was
planned. Communication is necessary. If residents’ complaints continue to escalate, they could
slow down the project and put this environmentally important project 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
that everything seems to be 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” and “what gives them the right to do this here?”
When you get back to the office you decide you need to take action.
DELIVERABLES • Document to Winnifred Doucette Lejeune, who after further investigation, is a local
resident that seems to spearhead any effort the town needs.
• Document to the company vice-president, Richard Smith, who asked to be told of any
• problem, or in his words, “anything that even remotely smells like a problem” with the
project.
• Document to sub-contractor supervisor at the construction site, Caspian Bauer. 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.
SCENARIO 3
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. 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.
One of the tasks you have assigned to MaintainU is keeping website security certificates, or
Secure Socket Layer (SSL) certificates, up to date. Unlike some services that renew
automatically until specifically canceled, SSL Certificates have a set expiry date. These
certificates authenticate a website’s identity and enable an encrypted connection. Companies and
organizations need to add SSL certificates to their websites to secure online transactions and
keep customer information private and secure.
Yesterday, you received an angry call from a client, Sheila Links at Gateway Industries,
because users of the company website were getting error messages stating that the SSL
certificate was expired and the content could not be trusted. You immediately got in touch with
Jason Hughes, the president of MaintainU, to inform him of the problem. Jason and his team
were able to update the certificate, but there remains work to be done.
Gateway Industries was one of the first clients your firm ever signed. While you were able to
get the mistake corrected, this penetration in security is a major transgression and has
compromised the client’s faith in the company. Further, for the first 6 months or so, the
relationship with MaintainU was great, but this error is a serious breach in security. 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. You have to reestablish productive working
relationships on several fronts.
DELIVERABLES
• Document to the client, Gateway Industries
• Document to MaintainU
• Document to Nathan Elder, the president of your company, who is a micro-manager and
likes to know everything that is going on
