Word Length: as required (approximately 1 page single spaced) Method: individual authorship Submission: electronic (upload a Word file through Brightspace) Assignment Description: This assignment asks you to revise a communication to demonstrate best practices in bad news messaging. The message has all the facts you need, but it is not fulfilling the needs of the communication situation. Decide what you will keep, what you will cut, and how you will change the wording and structure. For your submission, provide your new clean version (you do not need to show how you changed the original). Use single spacing and appropriate font. Situation: You are a manager at Dives, a small, start-up software company serving the financial audit industry. This company provides software called "DataCap" that integrates a series of AI powered features that improve a company's auditing and financial processes. It is your job to write to current clients with some bad news. You asked your intern to do a draft of that message and received the text below. Revise the communication in keeping with the best practices of "bad news" communication. Treat it as an email. Supply full header including subject line.

This notification is being sent to you to announce the termination of the DataCap lease upgrade feature on all client accounts with Dives. Because some clients abused the privilege, we must eliminate lease upgrade capability. You'll remember how we burst onto the scene with this revolutionary software, allowing lessees to scale tax functions through automatic data extraction, reduce risk and disruption with automated internal auditing of controls, while boosting collaboration, flatlining repetitive tasks and enhancing customer interface all for a fraction of the cost of similar established software suites. Our strategy was simple: undercut the competitors and hook customers with a deal too good to ignore. There were obvious benefits for you too. Leasing software like ours lets you manage your cashflow since you only pay a monthly fee for use, you don't have to lay out a large sum for purchase. At the same time you get 24/7 support, and, until now, you enjoyed free upgrades when features become more sophisticated or varied. It looked like a win-win situation.So, what went wrong?

Well, for starters we ran into those issues of misuse mentioned above.During software maintenance we discovered some lessees had added personal use to their databases. In one egregious case, a lessee was subleasing our system to another business. I'm sure you'll agree that this problem alone was enough to force us to take action. But it wasn't the only challenge. We're a small company. Providing round the clock support proved far more time-consuming than we anticipated, particularly given the high volume of remedial and nuisance calls. Many clients just wasted our time because they hadn't bothered with the training material. On top of that, we soon realized that our updates were far more sophisticated than we imagined. Patches and fixes to software were always free. What we offered, which was unusual, was free upgrades on new editions of the DataCap suite. That was tantamount to giving away better software at cost. The upgrades didn't just streamline the system. They added entirely new features, like the proprietary risk mapping, which allows users real-time ROI calculation and predictive analytics anticipating depreciation, and soon we'll be adding unexpected cost fluctuation.We should have sold those upgrades separately, rather than just bundling them into the same software our original clients bought when we first started. Those clients made out very well for themselves.We, on the other hand, haven't made out so well. While they were ensured easily managed cashflow and stable pricing, we, as the lessor, suffered constantly constricted financing. Finally, we realized it was too expensive to service a growing list of clients, while at the same time trying to invest in research and development to ensure ever evolving software features and enhancements to meet our clients' future needs.

Did you ever stop to wonder where those great new features came from? Innovation costs money. To continue the cost-free upgrade allowance would have meant raising our leasing prices or cutting our innovation. As a small but growing tech business, we decided it was more logical to rethink the overly generous lease arrangement. Any business system will eventually be superseded as the needs of the market evolve. To grow and thrive you'll need to keep an eye on always improving your efficiency and profitability. Competitive companies like yours understand this simple truth and are willing to invest in future success.

Considering all these issues, therefore, we regret that we must take this action of terminating our previous software arrangement. Going forward you can expect the same high-quality software solutions, the same dedicated service, and the same low price lease fees. It's all the same, only effective immediately there will be no more free upgrades on your current software package. You'll have to pay more to upgrade or add features. When you decide it is time to make a change to your finance and audit systems, we'll have new software options ready for you to choose from, with pricing that can meet any budget.

Please accept our apologies for this inconvenience. Contact me if you have any questions. Remember, company growth and resilience are just a click away with Dives!