Posted: April 8th, 2015

Scenario Assignment 5

Scenario Assignment 5

Order Description

Purpose

Progress reports are the lifeblood of technical organizations. In this assignment, you are participating in one of the most common forms of progress report: the communication between a functional group manager and a project manager. It is important that the divisions of responsibility are understood here: In its simplest form, the technical group manager is in charge of the AVI people who are doing the work and also in charge of some of the general company physical resources; the project manager is in charge of the money, the outside contracts, and the project-specific resources.

Role and Audience

You are: Elaine Cho, EIG Group Supervisor
Your audience is: Amy Ward (keeping in mind that she may share your report)
Introduction

You were present at the briefing Amy Ward gave to the sponsor last month describing what AVI would do to ensure that Pinpointer stayed on schedule to begin system acceptance testing in Month 9 of the project. It is now the end of Month 7. The EIG group worked with the engineers at ESL, following the plan that Amy proposed, but has discovered that because several engineers have unexpectedly left ESL during the last two weeks of Month 7, the integration of the ESL software into the Pinpointer hardware will not get done for many months using current ESL engineers.

Meanwhile, AVI will begin the acceptance-testing phase of the project at the beginning on Month 9 with the portions of the system that are ready. Currently the best option for integrating the locator algorithm software from ESL into the flight and ground station hardware is to find a subcontractor who has the expertise to accomplish that work in as short a time as possible. AVI has no engineers on staff who can do that work.

Important note: the only problem with ESL is that they are short-staffed. There are no overriding technical issues with ESL.Their algorithm worked fine in proof of concept testing at ESL using experimental flight hardware a few months ago.

Assignment

As Elaine Cho, the EIG group supervisor, you write (or email) a monthly progress report (500-1000 words) to Amy Ward on EIG’s work during Month 7 of the Pinpointer project.

Please find and use a monthly progress report format that you like and use AVI letterhead.
Because of the high visibility of the potential schedule delay on Pinpointer, assume that Charles Carey and Rich Roth will also read this report with interest (but remember, this report is Amy’s to share with them; you don’t send to them directly in this case).
Assume that the plan that your mid-term presentation team, as Amy Ward, presented to the sponsor was approved.
Your report should address all progress that EIG made during Month 7 and explain why the delivery of the integrated locator software will require additional subcontractor help.
Do not describe any effort to find that subcontractor.
The acquisition of a subcontractor will be pursued by Amy Ward and the AVI Program Office and will involve the expedited preparation of an RFP in the next couple of weeks.
References are not required for this assignment.