SEng 609.06
Special Topics in HCI
Saul Greenberg, Instructor
Contents

Take Home Exam

The questions below should be answered in essay form (i.e., as a technical paer). Answers should be thoughtful, and should reflect your ability to critically appraise the subject matter. You will be graded on the sophistication, completeness, and maturity of the treatment.There are no absolute 'right or wrong' answers.


The ACME Engineering Company has a head office in Calgary and branch offices scattered across Canada. Because of a recent downsizing, engineers with particular skill sets are now scattered across these branch offices, with no single office having a well-rounded contingent of engineers.

This has introduced a problem: most engineering contracts require particular mixes of engineers and managers, with the consequence that the typical team is now distributed across the country. A typical mix now has the project manager, project administrator and lead engineer in the Calgary head office, two other senior engineers in the Toronto office, three junior engineers, and four apprentice engineers (e.g., Coop students) scattered across the other offices.

Some other factors influence the problem:

  1. Customers are typically not in Calgary, although they are often located in other cities with branch offices.
  2. Projects involve heavy periods of intensive work.
  3. Projects must be tightly controlled.
  4. Engineers work together over many artifacts: blueprints, sight photos, engineering sketches, etc.
  5. Customers often have particular issues and requests that must be directed to particular engineers.

ACME is now using conventional communications mechanisms to do their work: email, phone, fax, travel, and a dedicated video conferencing room (this is located in a different building, so people have to schedule their meetings and go there). They also have dedicated high bandwidth communication channels between all their sites. However, this is not working out well: people are not staying in touch with one another; coordination is difficult; meetings are hard to set up, and so on.

The President of ACME has heard about real time groupware systems, and has hired you (as a budding groupware expert) to do a feasibility study of its applicability to this problem. The study should identify:

Unfortunately, you will not be able to interview the engineers and/or go to the workplace. If really needed, you can direct a few questions to the President (saul@cpsc.ucalgary.ca). Clearly state any assumptions you make!


Last updated December 1997, by Saul Greenberg