Technical Communication

INTRODUCTION

In your career, you may need to use different methods of communication for your job depending on circumstances, such as communicating with your team, those to whom you report, or internal or external customers. This task will help you demonstrate your skills in analyzing the needs of an audience and adapting the message according to the situation.

SCENARIO

You have been hired as a software development manager for a large online retail company. You manage a team of developers who maintain the application programming interface (API) used to interact with your company’s e-commerce data. The company currently hosts the API at an offsite data center that houses several servers. The site is fully staffed 24 hours a day to ensure uninterrupted service to your customers. The company API has expanded over the last year, and in turn, data center maintenance and expansion costs have sharply increased.

The executive team had tasked the former manager to research cloud-based systems to see if such a migration would solve the growing data center costs (e.g., salaries, updating of servers, real estate). The former manager created an ineffective presentation to communicate the findings to the whole company. You will write a critique explaining how or why the presentation is not appropriate for all employees to see.

You will then need to research cloud-based alternatives for the API and determine what kind of technical communication deliverable would be most effective to communicate your findings to each stakeholder audience so they understand how they may be affected.

REQUIREMENTS

Your submission must be your original work. No more than a combined total of 30% of the submission and no more than a 10% match to any one individual source can be directly quoted or closely paraphrased from sources, even if cited correctly. An originality report is provided when you submit your task that can be used as a guide.

You must use the rubric to direct the creation of your submission because it provides detailed criteria that will be used to evaluate your work. Each requirement below may be evaluated by more than one rubric aspect. The rubric aspect titles may contain hyperlinks to relevant portions of the course.

Part One: PowerPoint Critique

A.   Critique the attached “PowerPoint Presentation,” explaining why it is ineffective or inappropriate for communicating the information to all company employees. Support your explanation with specific examples from the presentation.

Part Two: Technical Communication Deliverables

B.   Create a technical communication deliverable for company leadership that explains both  the financial and functional advantages of migrating the API from the current data center to a cloud-based system.

C.   Create a technical communication deliverable for all company employees that summarizes the cloud migration project, the innovative technologies involved, and the plans for informational or training sessions for employees.

D.   Create a technical communication deliverable with graphics that support audience comprehension, for current and potential customers that explains the customer experience benefits that will come from the cloud migration.

Part Three: Deliverable Justification

E.   Justify how the content, structure, and design principles used in the company leadership deliverable meet the specific needs of the audience.

F.   Justify how the content, structure, and design principles used in the company employee deliverable meet the specific needs of the audience.

G.   Justify how the content, structure, and design principles used in the customer deliverable meet the specific needs of the audience.

H.   Acknowledge sources, using in-text citations and references, for content that is quoted, paraphrased, or summarized.

I.   Demonstrate professional communication in the content and presentation of your submission.