short paper

Prompt: 

Team Building and Collaboration (Module One)

International Gadgets is a company with offices throughout the United States and in Europe. There has been a history of miscommunication within office departments, between offices, and, most importantly, between the company and its wide customer base. You have been hired as a manager in the newly created communications department. The purpose of your position is to improve these problematic channels of communications. 

Company Background

International Gadgets (IG) is a multinational company of 1,300+ employees and over $4 billion in revenue. Headquartered in Manchester, New Hampshire, the company designs, manufactures, sells, and supports a variety of low- and high-tech business productivity tools. 

IG has manufacturing facilities in Detroit, Michigan, and Shanghai, China, and sources component parts from suppliers in Vietnam, China, Brazil, and the United

States. While IG maintains sales offices in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, London, Munich, Paris, Moscow, and Brussels, its products are sold throughout the United States and all of Europe and in China through a partner firm. IG employs both a direct sales force targeting its top 1,000 customers as well as selling via its website. Sales offices also include service and support operations, managed separately from the sales teams. The company is considering expanding more directly into China and exploring the possibility of opening a sales office in Beijing.

IG’s current top-selling product is the OfficeDrone, designed for workplace monitoring. The OfficeDrone is a small unmanned aerial vehicle for indoor use that includes real-time video monitoring and a targetable built-in water pistol and reservoir. The OfficeDrone is marketed to management and security teams to break up water cooler conversations and other non-productive behaviors among groups of workers.

IG has introduced several new products and experienced rapid growth during the past year with many new employees in all departments. The management team has greatly expanded as well, including several first-time managers, and is experiencing difficulties in functioning as effectively as in the past.

Communications within and between all parts of the organization, external partners, and suppliers and customers, are at serious risk of completely breaking down. 

In a recent example, Detroit Manufacturing was unable to meet a product delivery deadline because of parts shortages from supplies. (The component parts originated in Brazil and had been seriously delayed due to a dockworker’s strike at U.S. West Coast ports.) Manufacturing believed they had informed Sales of the delay, but Sales indicated they had never received that information and ended up losing the customer to a competitor. In another example, European sales were impacted when Switzerland unexpectedly devalued its currency, impacting IG’s profitability. Revised profitability forecasts were provided by several of the

European sales offices, but others did not understand the request from the corporate office due to how it was worded, and the delay in response led to unnecessary costs.

Your first task is to hire a small team to address these issues. Write a report to management describing the makeup and roles of your proposed team, what attributes you will be looking for in team members, and what you hope to accomplish with your new team. Be sure to offer solid reasoning in all areas of your report

By following the above case answer following:

Determining Audience Needs (Module Five) As the new technical communications manager for International Gadgets (IG), you have developed a good idea of the various internal and external audiences for communications across the enterprise. You have learned that IG is organized into five main areas consisting of Research & Development (R&D), Manufacturing, Sales & Marketing, Technical Support, and Finance/Accounting. Each area has its own structure:

· R&D – New Product Development and Product Enhancement teams

 · Manufacturing – Detroit, Shanghai, and Purchasing teams

· Sales & Marketing – U.S. Sales, U.S. Marketing, European Sales, European Marketing, Partner Management, and Online Sales teams

· Technical Support – the exception, as there is only a single team handling this function

· Finance/Accounting – Corporate Finance and Corporate Accounting teams

 · Human Resources – Corporate HR team with ties to HR representatives at each work site In addition to the internal departments, IG staff interface with a wide range of external entities and individuals including customers (large accounts, individuals via web sales), distribution partners, component suppliers, subcontractors (design and occasional manufacturing). IG also contracts with Amazon to handle all its product logistics—warehousing, packaging and shipping, and returns.

However, you have noticed that different audiences do not always have the same needs from similar announcements. For example, a communication announcing the launching of a new product means different things to different departments.

Question to be answered in memo:

In a memo to your communications team, instruct them on ways to discover the needs of the stakeholders in different areas of the company so that a new product announcement will be relevant to them.

Rubric Guidelines for Submission: Review the Purdue Owl: Memo website for suggestions and formatting guidelines on memo structure.

apa citation

12pt  times new roman

one page

no plagiarism