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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