TA (C effort)

To: Manager
Re: New software to replace the current reporting system

The old AQ reporting can soon be replaced with a new system using OLAP processing. This will allow faster report customization (and be more reliable.) Switching over to a new software setup will require a different skill set from the current LAMP model. The new programmer will have to be trained on the job; however the learning curve is guaranteed not to be the three month ordeal.

The software will require more time to develop. While it may not allow the exact same report format, it will be easy to update and keep an aggregate database over multiple years. This is good because those departments and programs that only graduate several people per year never get a report, because there are never enough respondents to be considered statistically significant (as well as enough to keep responses anonymous.) If it is easy to set up reports to work over several years, then getting reports for these departments will be relatively painless. Also more time can be spent looking at the data and finding useful correlations than slowly working with the existing software.

(Audience is a manager who directs research on the university programs. He has a little knowledge of programming, but is more concerned with the political implications of research than the research per se. He would love to customize reports and research for different departments. The software in question was created custom for the department, and is difficult to modify.)