Scenario: Our company has gone through considerable merger and acquisition activity in recent years, and we’re increasingly seeing too much variation in how key processes are accomplished across what used to be parts of separate organizations. The variability of these processes impacts projects that cross organizational boundaries, as is perceived as increasing the burden on staff and costs to the organization. Some of those process variations are better than others, so we’d like to expand the use of best practices.

Your management team has come to you with the above problem scenario that they need you to advise them on and plan a strategy to address. Write and submit a memo to your manager that describes something in your Standards Framework (Hint: Six Sigma is a good choice for this kind of problem!) that you believe will address the problem. Your memo should offer a general description of how your chosen Framework component(s) address the problem as described. It should then describe the long-term prospects for what it will mean to implement the component(s) in the organization, as well as a short-term description of how you’ll move toward implementation in the first three to six months.

Follow these instructions carefully….

• This memo is to your management, not to other engineers. It needs to be brief and concise, and yet contain appropriate technical details to properly explain your position and planning. The best management memos fit on a single page. Don’t re-explain the problem to them. Don’t go into deep detail that they don’t need to know. Stay focused on how implementing your plan will solve the problem.
• You are welcome to discuss the scenario with anyone you wish, including fellow students in this class. However, your memo must be distinctly yours. Sharing or comparing text with classmates will be considered plagiarism. Your memo must be YOUR wording.
• Make sure your submission looks and reads like a business memo to management. If you don’t know what that means, do some extra research. Normally in this class the actual look-and-feel of your writing is less important that the content — but on this assignment how your memo looks is important since an unstructured or “ugly” memo won’t be read or appreciated by the managers you send it to.
• Roughly a third of the points on this assignment will be for your submission looking and reading like a memo, a third for selecting and describing an appropriate standard from your Framework, and a third for explaining your plan effectively to management.