Learning Objectives
In this assignment you will:
- Read, analyze, and argue with data Using the provided descriptive statistics (the Tables), you will learn to read tables to understand what they are saying, and determine which information you can use from them to support your message.
- Critical thinking & problem-solving – You will review sources from the literature to identify the use of statistics in your field.
- Communication – You will present a clear message to the specific assigned audience. Your message will in part be based on integrating the appropriate content from the assigned descriptive statistics.
Required Reading/Viewing
- Executives downloadby House, Layton, Livingston & Moseley from The Engineering Communication Manual. This brief chapter will provide an introduction to communicating with Executives, or as this chapter refers to them as “Authorizers.”
- Professional Tone. This Canvas page provides a description of ‘professional tone’ and aspects of writing you can work with to accomplish it.
- Figures and Charts (Links to an external site.) on the UNC Writing Center Tips and Tools website. For the assignment read starting at “Using Figures” through to the end of the document.
Extra Reading, not required. This reading is provided for those of you that want to get a step ahead with writing about data. It goes beyond what you will be expected to do for this assignment but will be a useful resource for future work.
Description
In this assignment, you will work on writing about the same core content as in IDL 1 – what your field does with probability and statistics, but with a different audience and purpose. As a professional, it is common to have to communicate with a range of audiences on the work you are doing, where each audience has different knowledge of and interest in your work. To effectively communicate with each audience, you need to think about this and adjust your message to each audience. In this assignment, you will be presenting the importance of probability and statistics to executives in a consulting firm in your field. Their need to know this information is reviewed in the reading you were assigned. As their need for this information is different than the students’ need in IDL 1, you will be working with different data to argue your point.
Audience: Organizational Leaders. You will position yourself as an employee in a large consulting organization in your field. This is a firm that does the full breadth of work that your field does for a wide range of clients and project types. As this is a new type of audience to speak to for many of you, this assignment’s writing will add an additional element – an appropriate professional tone.
Please note: while some of you will go to work in organizations where your professional capabilities support the main goal of the organization, rather than being the focused purpose, this assignment is NOT structured for that type of work. As an example, you will not present this as an engineer working in a manufacturing facility.
Purpose: Making a case for the organization to invest more money to 1) hire new employees with probability and statistics literacy, and 2) train existing employees to be able to find, interpret, and apply data to the problems they are addressing for clients.
Deliverable: An internal report 700 words minimum, using the structure described in this assignment and the appropriate template, provided below
Complete and Synthesize Research
For this assignment, you will have two types of input information, statistical data and literature review. Please notice the order of this input is reversed from the sequence used in the first assignment.
Data. With this report, you are looking to support a case to senior leadership in your fictitious company that they need to invest in hiring and training existing employees for increased ability to use probability and statistics in their work; in other words that there is a benefit to the organization for employees to be data literate so they can find data, complete analysis of data, use it productively, and present it to the relevant audiences. For this assignment, you will review the following document looking for data in the text and its graphs that can support the case you are making to your company executives. At the least, you must integrate into your text information from Figures 2, 3, and 5.
Required Source: Analytics and AI-driven enterprises thrive in the age of with: The culture catalyst downloadby Tim Smith, Ben Stiller, Jim Guszcza, and Tom Davenport from Deloitte Insights.
Using other Data: for the first assignment, several students decided to use alternative data. You may opt, to find additional data, but MUST use the required data from the document provided. Additional credit will not be given for additional sources however, it will be considered (if from a credible source) as part of the case you are making. This does mean you will need to use both an in-text citation and a correctly formatted reference, so the grader can tell if your source is credible.
Literature Review. The purpose of this assignment is to work with the same core material you reviewed for IDL 1 but to revise your content to be appropriate for this audience and purpose. Therefore, you will start with the same core research, from ‘Role of Probability and Statistics in the Work of Your Field’ page. As with the first paper, you are not limited to these sources, however, they should provide a good foundation for initiating this work. Remember the questions you considered for the first assignment BUT, view them as a member of a company reporting to senior leadership.
- What can a professional consulting firm in your field do with probability and statistics to help clients? What range of services can you provide to clients using probability and statistics?
- What type of input into the work of your field statistics provides. By this, I mean is it used for defining problems, evaluating systems and products, and/or creating products and tools. Some of these may be general aspects of work and some may be specific product types.
Connecting to the USF Library from off-campus. (Links to an external site.) Connecting to the Library from off-campus requires a few specific steps that allow the Library systems to see you as a student, and allow you full access to USF Library resources. If you do not complete these steps you will not have access to the materials you will need. Please review the hyperlinked library skills guide.
Compose Content
See the hyperlinks below for links to the templates to be used for the document you will create for this assignment.
Writing a professional document.
Tone – Appropriate tone is always important in professional writing. It involves your choice of document organization, and wording as resources to connect to your audience so that they engage with the communication you are sharing.
Organization a professional document must be organized clearly and consistently. Topic sentences, inform readers what is coming in the text and how it logically fits together. Readers will expect you to tell them a logical sequence in which you will present the material in this sentence and then follow it in your document.
Flow your writing must connect one idea to the next throughout the document.
Paragraphs and sentences You will write this document in paragraphs, using full sentences.
Language Use precise language, stating exactly what you are talking about. Do not use slang, shortened forms of words, or figures of speech. Acronyms may only be used after first spelling out the words with the initials behind them in parenthesis after the words.
Grammar and punctuation Use grammar editing tools to assure that your grammar and punctuation are correct. This is a necessary professional habit. You will lose points if the grader has to struggle to understand what you are saying.
No quotations and NO plagiarism They are not acceptable practices in professional engineering writing to use direct quotations. The words in your document must represent your own thinking, based on the information you have gathered. Citing credible sources from which you got ideas gives you credibility and it is required in this work. If you are unclear on plagiarism or are from a region of the world that may think about it differently, review the Plagiarism page.
Document Structure
Your document’s purpose is to persuade executives in your fictitious consulting firm (in your field) that they need to invest in hiring and training employees to be probability and statistics literate in order to be competitive and profitable. The linked example downloadillustrates an approach to the content and the required appearance of the document. As you are speaking to people that are higher in rank than you in the organization, this document must be more formal in tone than IDL 1 when you were writing to other students. You will include the following headings/subheadings:
- A Document Title. Document titles must briefly and precisely indicate the topic of the document. When writing for an internal audience, particularly people of higher status in the organization, it is critical that the title clearly, succinctly, and specifically identifies the scope of the document. Clever titles are less important for this type of internal document.
- Introduction. As with any professional document, the beginning of the document needs to provide readers with an overview of why this is important to them and what it will address. Start with the purpose of the document and what it is being presented for. Then state what is important to the audience when it comes to agreeing with what you are arguing for. You will support this in two ways 1) You will use data to argue that doing this will meet the audience’s needs and 2) you will discuss the important ways in which probability and statistics are used in the work of the organization (field).
- The Importance of Probability and Statistics Literacy for Our Company’s Success. In this section, you will include a discussion of the relevant parts of the data you reviewed earlier to indicate to your organization’s executives why probability and statistical literacy are important for the organization’s competitiveness and financial success – Analytics and AI-driven enterprises thrive in the age of with: The culture catalyst downloadby Tim Smith, Ben Stiller, Jim Guszcza, and Tom Davenport from Deloitte Insights. In-text citations are required in this section. No direct quotations are allowed, the work must be in your own words.
- Extra Credit Option: Review The Data Literacy Index: The $500m Enterprise Value Opportunity – Results Summary. downloadThis document includes important resources that can be used in this argument. For the extra credit, you will find data in the text that speaks to the financial benefit to an organization in being a data literate business and include this in your argument. In addition, there is a graphical presentation of data by industry from which you will find and use the only elements that support your case. You must read the document well enough to present both components accurately.
- What Our Company Can do with Probability and Statistics. Using the understanding of the uses of probability and statistics in your field you developed in assignment IDL 1, revise your thinking and presentation of this material to support the arguments you are making to executives. To assist you with this remember the roles of executives within the organization as described in your reading. Be sure you explain these in terms of their priorities. In-text citations are required in this section. No direct quotations are allowed, the work must be in your own words.
- Conclusion. In this section, you start with the summary of the ways probability and statistics are used by your organization, then remind the audience why what you are asking for is important for them, then state that you have completed the objective of showing why they should invest in hiring and training employees to be probability and statistics literate.
- Signature. While for an externally published report it is typical to include the contributors/authors at the front end of a document, for an internal document, you may include this information along with your signature at the end of the document.
