The goal of this exercise is to give you experience making suggestions to an author.

The Exercise

One of LaRence's clients is Green Pine Chemicals, a manufacturer of industrial solvents and cleaning products. LaRence is in the process of creating a materials management system for Green Pine. The system will track the raw materials used during the production process and then report their usage as they are consumed.

Giordanno has written a letter to J.F. Katz, a manager of systems development at Green Pine. Katz is new to the project, so Giordanno wants to bring him up to speed on the work that he and his team have completed and to let Katz know when his involvement will be necessary.

You are to direct your comments to the writer, Frank Giordanno, who is a functional analyst in the Management Systems department at LaRence Industries, a contracting firm that analyzes and designs custom information systems. For the sake of this exercise, imagine that you are one of Giordanno's peers (a coach, not a gatekeeper) and that he is free to follow or ignore your suggestions.

Depending on what your instructor asks you to do, you may present your comments orally or state them in a memo to the writer. In either case, be sure to follow all the suggestions for reviewing other people's writing that are presented in Chapter 14.

Remember that how you present your comments can be as important as what you suggest.

The Letter

LaRence Enterprises
Corporate Offices
9023 Glen Terrace, Suite 44
Boston, Massachusetts 02134
617-555-4437

August 8, 20xx

Mr. J.F. Katz
Manager of Systems Development
Green Pine Chemicals Corporation
87 Central Avenue
Boston, MA 02189

Dear Mr. Katz:

This letter discusses the work we have done up to this point in the project and outlines the next phase of work and deliverables. As you know, LaRence Enterprises is analyzing Green Pine's current materials management system and will be designing the new on-line system. I look forward to working with you on Phase 2 of this project.

I have selected Donna Bialk to be your lead contact on this effort. She is a technical architect at our firm who has helped develop materials management systems much like the one we are creating for Green Pine. She will be contacting you next week to schedule a start-up meeting for Phase 2, at which time you will meet the entire implementation team. The main purpose of this meeting is to present you with the system development plan and schedule for Phase 2.

For the past two months, my company has been working closely with several members of your staff involved in logistics and systems development, as well as future users of the on-line materials management system. Our work, which constituted Phase 1 of this project, resulted in a recommendation report for future work (I'll be talking more about this report later in this letter).

We conducted a focus group consisting of future users of the system. The purpose of this meeting was 1) to enable us to design a new system that will eliminate the shortcomings of the current system and 2) determine the scope and objectives of the project.