RE: Interface Design Update

Mery,

This sounds better than the limitations you were describing in the meeting.  We should be able to work with this.

Phillip

 -----Original Message-----

From:   mery.l.brown@accenture.com@ENRON 

Sent:   Monday, November 05, 2001 5:11 PM

To:     pallen@enron.com

Cc:     donald.l.barnhart@accenture.com; kmcdani@enron.com

Subject:        Interface Design Update

Phillip,

The purpose of this e-mail is to explain the results of our discussions

with the technical team after our meeting with you. We need to get your

approval of the points listed below so that we can begin building the

application.

We can have the Position and P&L Reports show the results of the learner's

decisions in previous periods, which will allow the learner move forward in

time with wrong answers. This will achieve our goal of giving the learners

"more rope" and letting them see the results of their mistakes. In order to

achieve this, we will have the following constraints:

   The feedback will be fairly high-level, as we discussed in Thursday's

   meeting. We will be able to provide feedback on cumulative P&L and

   positions, but not about specific actions the learner took in a previous

   period. We will not, for example, be able to say things like "In

   November, when we were headed into a cold winter, you chose to withdraw

   gas. What you should have done was..."

   We cannot save the P&L and position numbers. This means that if the

   learner leaves the simulation, returns to the main menu, or experiences

   a computer crash, his decisions will not be saved and he will need to

   start over at time period one.

   We cannot have the learner calculate P&L on storage costs,

   transportation costs, or hedging instruments. This is because the right

   answer and the available answer choices would have to depend on the

   decisions the learner has made. Now that the learner can go down any

   path he chooses, the number of possible answers is extremely large, and

   the right answers are variable. I believe these tasks will be actually

   better if we don't have the learner calculate P&L because he has already

   calculated P&L numerous times in the structurer/customer scenarios and

   conversion and arbitrage scenarios. Furthermore, the type of feedback we

   would have to give about specific P&L numbers will not flow well with

   the high-level, global-type feedback we are now planning to give in this

   task.

We cannot export price numbers into Excel because the Indeliq framework

does not support the downloading of data into external applications. The

technical effort required to add this functionality far exceeds our current

development budget. We can, however, do some calculations for the learner

on the screen. We can also try to somehow allow the learner to make the

mistake of using future prices instead of discounted prices.

If you could please respond with your approval or concerns by end of day

Wednesday, it will allow us to move forward with the development of this

simulation. I would be happy to discuss these points with you; please let

me know if you would like to set up a meeting.

Thank you.

Mery

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