COIT11239 Professional Communication Skills for ICT 1 CRICOS Code: 00219C | RTO Code: 40939 Assignment 3 Business Report and Presentation Weight: 50% Due: Week 12, Friday, 2 June 2017 11:45PM AEST For this assignment, you are to create a project proposal for an organisation that wishes to enhance its communications with technology. We would like you to present your proposal and support it with a business report. The description of the organisation is provided below. You may choose another appropriate case study, e.g., related to your work. Approval for an alternative organisation must be obtained from the unit coordinator. Case Study: Overview of Tracksuits-N-Sportswear Tracksuits-N-Sportswear Company Limited is a business located in Brisbane that sells T-shirts and tracksuit tops and pants. Their mission is to be a provider of high-quality T-shirt and tracksuit apparel using simple designs. They purchase the right to use the name/logo of institutions (e.g., universities) and sports franchises for their designs. For the first two years of operation, Tracksuits-N-Sportswear operated out of a garage office where all employees worked within earshot and orders were passed around the garage. However, a rapid increase in demand for their products led to the owners leasing commercial premises to house their operations: sales/marketing, production, distribution, billing, and administration. To increase business, they have also started an additional sales and marketing operation in Beijing, China. Business documents such as orders and invoices are passed between departments via email. Employees call each other on landlines and mobile phones. The owners distribute general news to the employees using email newsletters. The time taken between when a customer orders until the order is shipped has doubled since the move to the commercial premises. The owners feel that the lack of effective communications is the cause of the increase in order-to-ship time. The owners have hired you as a consultant. Their idea is to implement a social media based communication system. They would like an existing system or a collection of existing systems that that supports: • Sending messages to individuals and groups. • Is able to track the location of each employee in the distribution department – for safety reasons. • Supports online meetings.COIT11239 Professional Communication Skills for ICT 2 Your task is to identify a system or collection of systems that support the owners’ requirements. Business Report Please write a business report to report your findings. Summary and Evaluation (400-800 words) Summarise the organisation’s proposal, perhaps including aspects such as: • Any relevant business requirements of the organisation, and • The context of the organisation, e.g., the existing flow of information within the organisation and the types of information that currently flow. Evaluate the organisation’s idea based on how it will affect communication within their organisation. While your report may draw on the material covered in this unit, you are expected to find and use references beyond those provided by this unit. You could consider: • How the communication model applies to the organisation, and • How the organisation’s proposal would affect the communication in terms of the model’s application. Ethical and Intercultural Implications (200-400 words) Discuss the ethical and intercultural implications of using the systems within the organisation’s context. You could consider aspects such as: • Employee, employer or customer privacy when using the technologies, and • How the technologies, or the structure of the organisation and its information flows impact any intercultural communication. Recommendations (200-400 words) Please include three to six recommendations to the owner as to how they should proceed. Provide convincing, well-structured recommendations that are supported with evidence. Apply logos, ethos and pathos to persuade the reader. In particular, you should build a structured argument using Toulmin’s model for each of your recommendations. Having investigated the social media options as per the owners’ request, make recommendations as to how the owners of TracksuitsN-Sportswear could most effectively improve their communications and consequently reduce their order-to-ship times.3 Presentation We would like you to present your findings to the client. Create a slide show, e.g., a PowerPoint, to support your presentation. Your presentation should last approximately ten minutes. Internal students will present during class time. Distance students will present online during a group video conference. Distance students will require a web cam, microphone and speaker (or headset). Groups You may work alone or in groups of up to four. All group members will usually receive the same mark. The unit coordinator must be informed prior to submission if a group decides to split. All members of the group are required to speak for at least two minutes each. Submission Include the names of your group members when you submit your assignment. Only one submission per group is necessary. Usually, all group members will receive the same mark. Submit your Business Report as a Word document. Submit your slide show as a PowerPoint document. Feedback Your grades and feedback will be available at grade certification (7 July, 2017). Assignment Criteria The complete marking criteria are available on the Moodle website. Business Report (60%) The marking criteria includes aspects such as: • Quality of summary and evaluation • Quality of recommendations: quality of arguments and references, • Business report structural integrity, organisation, writing style and framing, • Ethical and intercultural/diversity communications context, • Referencing: meticulous use of CQU Abridged Harvard Referencing Style; andCOIT11239 Professional Communication Skills for ICT 4 • Mechanics, grammar, and proofing: Your assignment is virtually free from mechanical, grammatical, punctuation, and spelling errors. Presentation (40%) The marking criteria includes aspects such as • Presentation structural integrity, organisation and framing, • Presentation content quality, • Presentation non-verbals, and • Mechanics, grammar, and proofing: Your assignment is virtually free from mechanical, grammatical, punctuation, and spelling errors. Marks may be deducted for aspects such as, but not limited to, incomplete submissions, plagiarism and inability of staff to access any externally linked assessable material.