Memo writing

Background: The purpose of this exercise is that you practice your memo writing skills. Below is the raw material for the memo. Please write your memo according to the guidelines we have discussed. Your memo should not exceed approximately 1.5 pages.

How to complete this assignment: The memo comes from you in your capacity as Manager, Computer Operations, who heads the Department of Information Technology (DIT). You are sending it to the Executive Committee of the school, with a copy to Jane Frowley, the Director of Purchasing of the University. The purpose of your memo is to communicate a new IT purchasing policy being instituted by your department for the whole school.

The facts you want to communicate in the memo are the following (not necessarily in this order). If there is missing information that you can clearly identify, please add it to the memo:

• IT purchasing is currently done by each department separately
• Buyers utilize a lot of different vendors, which wastes money for the school.
• Many times, purchased equipment is not compatible with what is already there, making a lot of work for the IT staff.
• Buying from many different vendors also violates University policy, since many of the vendors are not on the University’s List of Approved Vendors.
• The new policy will be that all IT purchases will be made by the Department of Information Technology (DIT).
• When a department needs a new piece of IT equipment/software, the first thing to do is to contact the DIT in order to define what is needed and to generate a quote.
• Then, the departmental administrator is supposed to check the department budget to see if enough money is there.
• Once the equipment request (including the quote) has been signed off by the department chair, your department will order the equipment.
• Your personnel will then install the equipment, check with the end user that everything is working and get another sign-off.
• This policy will be in effect starting February 1, 2005.
• The policy does not apply to small items with a value of less than $30.

Your recipients are technically not very savvy. So, in order to communicate this new policy effectively, you should ensure that they can understand the content of your memo fully. Add explanatory detail which you consider necessary without being too verbose. In terms of formulating the text, you do not have to stick to the text of the bullet points.

Deliverables:
Before 12:00 noon of the day of the lab session, please e-mail your completed memo to Titus Schleyer. In the lab session, you will critique someone else's memo first, befor we review some examples jointly. Your edit of the memo is part of your graded assignments.

Grading criteria: Criteria for grading are, in order of importance: (1) your compliance with structural guidelines for writing memos; (2) your compliance with writing style guidelines; (3) the clear and logical presentation of the content of the memo; and (4) the quality of the edits to the provided memos.