I believe that all computing and IT courses should have a systems analysis module because it is a really intriguing subject that enables the student to think a lot more about computer systems and how they could be improved. Personally for me this module has opened my eyes to the way that systems are developed like the use of data flow diagrams and the designing of user interfaces for different pieces of software. Before I did this module I never really put much thought into how much work goes into even the simplest aspect of a computer program like the main screen for e.g. but know I realise that every aspect is thought about immensely so that it can be best suited to its requirements.

In a business and management degree you are concerned with how to run a successful business so I don’t personally believe that a systems analysis module would be best suited as it may just go to waste as they may never use the knowledge learned in the module in their future careers and therefore they would be better off using that time slot to study something more relevant to their chosen subject. In systems analysis you are looking at computer systems in a business and trying to improve them so that they can be more efficient etc so I don’t believe that it would be a suited module to a business degree in that respect.

 The one aspect that I enjoyed most of systems analysis was looking at a business and from the information given drawing up a context and level 1 DFD. I found that to do this piece of work you had to really understand the way the system worked and I found this very interesting. The aspect that I least enjoyed was the design of user interfaces as I am not a really good at knowing what colours go with what etc and therefore I would struggle in the presentation aspect of the module.

All in all I really enjoyed the systems analysis module as it was interesting the way that you delve into a business’s current system and devise ways in which you can make that system better so that it can make that business potentially more profitable.

http://www.tuition.com.hk/models.htm

 When it comes to conveying your complex analysis and design details to end users and designers using a diagram then you have a number of options which you could use but it all depends what you are going to be portraying in this diagram. In this post I will be going through different diagrams that are used instead of text to explain details to end users and designers etc:

 ERD (Entity relationship diagram)

If you had carried out your analysis of a business and decided that they needed a database to hold their information about customers etc. then you would have to make use of an entity relationship diagram (ERD) to show the end users and the designers of the database what way each table in the database would relate to the others. In an ERD an entity is a table and the relationship lines represent the keys in one table that point to specific records in related tables.

 Flowcharts

Flowcharts are really easy to understand and they are used to show how steps in a process fit together and in what sequence they will be carried out. This makes them very useful for documenting how a system works and how a job is done. Flow charts are used by programmers and designers when working on a project because they are a graphical way of designing a program.

 Gant charts

Gant charts are used in the world of project management and their purpose is to illustrate project deadlines and the overall project schedule. These GANT charts also show dependency between tasks in a project which means that a project manager can see what tasks have to be completed before another is started and this saves the project manager a lot of headaches. There is a GANT chart application that can be used when you go into Microsoft Office and open Microsoft Project. This program allows you to have a computer based GANT chart which makes it even easier to change any details if you wish too like deadlines for e.g.  

 Structure charts

A structure chart is a graphic depiction of the decomposition of a problem and it is a tool to aid in software design. It is particularly helpful on large problems and it illustrates the partitioning of a problem into sub-problems which show the hierarchical relationships among the parts.

 Advantages of Entity Relationship diagrams

The advantage of using an ERD to shows the end users the relationships between tables in a database is that it makes the whole database structure seem more simple and easy to understand when it is laid out in a diagram. If it were just explained to the end user using text it would get very confusing for both the end user and for the designers and this is exactly what you want to avoid when carrying out systems analysis and design.

This type of diagram is extremely useful when you are trying to show how tables relate to each other because when completed correctly an ERD will be easy to understand even if you are a computer novice. One reason why it is so easy to interpret is that when you design an ERD you make a key which shows what symbols stand for what and this would make it easy to understand for the end users. 

http://www.learningspaces.org/n/1311/erd.html

 Advantages of GANT charts

GANT charts are extremely useful to a project manager who may be in charge of a massive project worth millions of pounds because it lays out the whole project for you so that all you have to do is make sure that you meet your set deadlines. This makes it a lot easier than if he just had all these details written down in a long text document because you wouldn’t just be able to glance at it and immediately see where you are and what you need to do in order to stay ahead of the project. The Microsoft Project program makes it even easier to manoeuvre and to change things like the project end dates and this makes life easier for the project manager who let’s face it is probably already under enough stress without having to think about looking through a text document to find his next deadline.

The Microsoft Project program is an extremely useful piece of kit to a project manager because it also allows them to print out the whole GANT chart with details included like days needed for each task and which tasks are dependent on other tasks. This is very useful because when using a GANT chart a project manager will mostly likely be changing something in the chart and this program allows him to do this with ease.

http://www.gantt-chart.biz/gantt-charting-made-easy/

 http://climbing-the-hill.blogspot.com/2009/04/programmers-work-day.html

http://resources.zdnet.co.uk/articles/features/0,1000002000,39454844,00.htm

 When working in systems analysis and design you are always working with people and to do this you have to be a good communicator. You also have to be able to be a middle man between the computer novices i.e. the business you are designing the system for and the computer experts who will be making the system i.e. programmers. This in mind you can imagine that there is a lot of meetings going on during your working day as a systems analyst and in an 8 hour day the time spent in meetings could be anywhere between 20%-25%. To come up with this estimate I used the following websites:

http://www.bls.gov/oco/ocos287.htm

http://www.michigan.gov/careers/0,1607,7-170-46398-64740–,00.html#working

Post implementation review meeting:

The purpose of a post implementation review is to conduct a meeting with all the people who were involved in the development of the system that has been created/ upgraded and to evaluate the whole procedure. This meeting is carried out with all the members of the project team so that they can look at the way that they went about designing and implementing the system and improve on it. The focus in this meeting is what went well and what didn’t go so well and steps to avoid these complications in future projects so that when they come to do another project of this type they will be more equipped to do a better job. Then when this meeting is finished and everyone in the project team has got their opinion across the meeting is finished but the notes that were taken down during the meeting will be taken out and looked at before the start of the next project so that they will not make the same mistakes or in the case that something went really well they will be aiming to repeat what they did.

What happens before, during and after a Structured Walkthrough

A structured walkthrough is a term used to describe the process of going through code that a programmer has written and detecting any errors that may be in it but a structured walkthrough is also used to get idea’s etc from different members within a team about the way that the project is going at the minute.

Before the structured walkthrough the programmer should go through his/her own work to proofread it and this is to make sure that all is in the right place and that there are no minor mistakes in the code like spelling mistakes etc. Also as a structured walkthrough is best effective when it is done in different parts i.e. different segments of the code that makes up a program. This is because it is easier to detect errors in short spells instead of doing it all at once because after a while it is harder to keep concentration.

During a structured walkthrough there will be the programmer who write the code and one or more senior programmers who will go through it and detect any errors that may be in it. The structured walkthrough process is done to detect errors not to correct them because this is done after the structured walkthrough is completed.

After the structured walkthrough has been completed all the errors that have been detected in the code will be removed by the programmer who was writing that piece of code and this usually doesn‘t take that long to complete.

Scrum meetings

Scrum meetings got their name from a rugby play where team members come together in a tight formation in an attempt to move the ball down field while under competitive pressures. In a scrum meeting you are either a “chicken” or a “pig”. “Pigs” are the Scrum team members who consist of the product owner, scrum master, developers, testers and the “chickens” are the people who want the product  i.e. customers, management. These types of meetings usually last for 10-15 minutes daily at the same time for a couple of weeks. In a scrum meeting only the “pigs” are permitted to speak while the “chickens” have to sit back and take it in while also offering suggestions etc. During the meeting, each team member answers three questions:

• What have you done since yesterday?
• What are you planning to do by tomorrow?
• Do you have any problems preventing you from accomplishing your goal?

If the people and teams involved in the pig roles don’t or can’t deliver, they must begin again or lose the project. Those involved in “chicken” roles, who offer feedback, suggestions, and provide an arena for the product’s outcome don’t lose if the project fails. They await a new pig outcome in the Scrum process.

There are many advantages to using the Scrum Methodology:

• Communication can improve across all the teams and this is always a plus when you are working as a team to complete an IT project.
• It provides for an open forum, where everyone knows who is responsible for which item and this is important because everyone knows their role and can focus more on that role therefore maximising chances of success
• Scrum can increase team efficiency by as much as 20 percent.
• Problems are more transparent and therefore can be worked out a lot easier than if they were more hidden problems.

The link to Emma’s Cafe survey 1b is http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=bt9fjz2_2by7bGX3evjVatOA_3d_3d

Before any new business is set up there is always market research done to see if there will be a big enough possible customer base to make the business a success. Doing this research gives the business an insight into how well their business will do if they set it up. There are a number of ways in which to carry out this market research but the one that I have used for Emma’s café is a questionnaire survey. The types of questions that I have asked in my survey are all designed to find out the person’s eating habits and whether or not they would be interested in a vegetarian café. Then when I have had around 1000 people fill out my survey I will have a better understanding of their eating habits etc which will then give me an oversight into whether or not this business would do well in the Jordanstown university.

In the survey that I have created the first ten questions are mainly to do with finding out the persons details like what they are studying at university and how often they eat in the university. Asking these types of questions gives me an insight into their daily eating habits which is exactly what I want to find out. When I have found out this information then I can use it to determine whether or not I believe that this business would be right to set up within this university.

The whole point of this survey is to make it as easy for the person to understand whilst also getting the correct data from them. The way that I have laid out my survey is that I have used a lot of multiple choice questions this way I can get the kind of response that I am looking for whilst also making it very easy for the person to fill it out, because no one will want to fill out something that looks to complicated. Also if I had laid out all the questions with a box where they had to fill in the answer themselves this would make it look to the person like it was a lot of hard work and they might have just passed on filling it out.

I have also made all the questions in the survey sequential which means that they are in a particular order which I have neatly laid out. Putting them in order allows me to keep the person filling it out concentrating on the questions that they are reading and not about thinking that this is the worst put together survey in history. For e.g. I have asked the types of questions which enable me to find out this person’s eating habits first before I enquire about whether or not they would be interested in a vegetarian café. The reason I have done this is simple its because it will make the survey look more professional if everything looks to be in the right order plus it makes the retrieval of the information a lot easier which will be a bonus when all this research has been completed.

As questionnaire surveys like the one that I have created for this possible business venture are secondary accounts of their eating habits and preferences I will also have to carry out observational research which basically means watching the people and gathering evidence first hand of their eating habits. The reason for doing this is that people when presented with a survey are going to respond the way that the think that they should i.e. they will give the answers that they think that the person is expecting and this is exactly what we want to avoid at all costs as it would give us an untrue account of these people and therefore the survey would have been a waste of time.

The timing of this observation will have to be at the busiest periods within the university as to get a fair reading of peoples eating habits. The times that I have chosen to carry out this observation are between the hours of 1pm and 4pm as this would be the time period when most students would go to have lunch. The days that I have chosen to observe the students are Mondays and Tuesdays and the reason for this is because after some research I have come to the conclusion that this is when there are the most students in the university. I also chose this time period because these are the days that I believe that students will eat in the university the most as they would have had a long weekend of working etc and they will not be too enthusiastic about making their own lunches.

The method of observation that I am going to use is direct observation and this is because it tends to be more focused than participant observation. In direct observation the researcher is observing certain sampled situations which make it a lot less time consuming which in turn will make it a lot cheaper to carry out. This will suit this business as the less money that is spent the better without jeopardizing the quality of the data that is retrieved from it.

The possible problems that I expect from this observation are that the students might notice that I am hanging around doing this research and it may make them act differently than they usually would. This is because when a person knows that you are watching them they always act in a way that they think that they should be and if they do this would make this research very useless to me. This type of behavior can be done consciously or subconsciously and it is called the Hawthorne effect. The way that I am going to decrease the risk of this happening is to be very discreet with my research so that everybody acts normally and therefore I get an accurate account of their eating habits and therefore would deem the research a success.

In this technological world that we live in today approximately 25% of the world’s population use the Internet and this has vastly changed the way that people around the world do their business or in the case of the consumer do their shopping.  There is no better time to get into the world of e-commerce and sell their goods online and this is for a number of reasons which I will go through. Firstly is the big advantage that the vast number of people using the Internet has sky rocketed in the last few years and this means that potentially their site could have a big following as long as they get it set up correctly and advertise it well. Another big advantage to doing this kind of business is that unlike their normal shops where they have to open and shut them at certain times in the day their e-commerce site will be open for business 24/7 taking orders.

A lot of businesses these days are running what is called a “brick and click” organisation and what this means is that they have both a physical shop that customers can walk into and buy their products and an online presence where the customers can shop online. This way of doing business is extremely smart and it can increase the profits for these organisations exponentially. One example of an extremely successful “brick and click” business is Tesco because with the use of e-commerce Tesco now has an annual turnover of £1 billion online alone and this is just in the United Kingdom. This is a gargantuan sum to be making online alone and it shows that if used correctly an e-commerce site should produce a lot of extra profit for the ABC bakeries business.

In this next part I will run through the costs that will be incurred during the set up of their proposed new site. To set up an e-commerce site a domain needs to be registered which will cost between £5 and £20. Next is the hosting of the site which for the average e-commerce site that has several hundred products this will be around £100 a year. Obviously for ABC bakeries who would not have anywhere near this amount of products the price will be a lot cheaper. The price of the web design for the site is a lot harder though to predict as it depends on a number of factors like the design style and complexity of the products that they are going to sell. There are companies that will charge a business monthly for the setting up and hosting of the site. On average this will cost around £100 but as this is a small business that will have the most basic of a web page with a lot fewer products than the average site will have I would estimate that it would cost around £50 a month. An alternative is to make use of a e-commerce or shopping cart package such as Actinic. They will set up the site and give maintenance to it for one year and this will cost approximately £399 + VAT for the setting up of the site and then another £250 + VAT for 1 years maintenance. I believe that this is the way to go for ABC bakeries because the cost is a lot more simplified than if you had to pay monthly plus you get one years maintenance and in this year they could have one of their full time staff trained so that they would be able to take over the maintenance of the site after the first year.

Task 2

Now that it has been decided to move forward with this e-commerce site for the ABC bakeries business I will run through the staff that will be needed. The first person that this business should go look for now that they have decided to go through with this new way of doing business is a systems analyst. The systems analyst role in this project will be to look at the business as a whole and from this they will use their extensive knowledge of IT systems to be able to write a list of requirements that this new site will have to meet in order for it to be a success. More specifically the systems analyst will evaluate data input, flow, processing, storage, and output as related to their business challenges. When the systems analyst has completed his/her work then this business must hire a web designer who has expertise in setting up e-commerce websites. The web designers job will be to meet the requirements set down by the systems analyst to build an e-commerce site that bodes perfectly with the ABC bakeries business. The web designer will also work closely with the management at ABC bakeries to make sure that they create the kind of website that is needed.

Enrollment at the university of Ulster Jordanstown campus was a mixture of both person to person communication and online registering which took place at the University’s library the LRC. I believe that the system did work well and that it was very thorough in that it made all the checks that had to be made before a person could become an official student. I also believe that the enrollment process was a well organised affair because throughout that week the University is dealing with several thousand newcomers who all have to be enrolled correctly and efficiently and because of this I belive that they have a very well structured approach to this process.

How easy was it for you to go through?

The enrollment at this university was only the second time that I had ever been inside the building at this campus, the first time being on open day. This made me a little nervous as I was starting another major part of my life. This made the enrollment process for me seem a lot more strenuous than it might have been but this is no judgement on the University itself because they made the whole process as warm and friendly as they possibly could.

Would it have been harder for someone coming from a non IT back ground? If you entered the course from a non IT background, do you think that made the system harder to use?

No I don’t believe that coming from a non IT background would make this process harder because a lot of the enrollment procedure was carried out in a person to person basis which meant that the only use of a computer was at the very end when you registered online at the LRC. Even then there were a lot of helpers who would gladly show you how to do this if you were stuck in any way which was very useful for people who were not that computer literate.  

How well or badly did the manual and the computer based parts of the system fit together?

I believe that both the manual and computer based parts of the system fit together very well and whoever set up this system should be whole heartedly applauded because this is not a simple procedure when you are dealing with this many newcomers. All of these people had to have their ID’s checked and verified and important data like addresses, GCSE and A level results all looked over by a member of staff. In my lecture classes alone there are approximately 180 people and as all of us had to be checked then sent to the next part of the process this had to be done correctly whilst also getting it done as quickly as possible. If this process was not well organised we could have been there all day and that wouldn’t have been very enjoyable and my first impressions of this University would have been tainted from then on.

Is the user interface well designed?

The user interface of the online enrollment in the LRC I believe was well designed as it was very easy to use and if you made a mistake you could easily go back and change it because it allows you to view all the pages that you have filled out before you click finish. Also the helpers that were all around the LRC were very useful if you were not sure what you were doing. The user interface of the manual part of the process was also well designed as it was very efficient whilst the people carrying it out were very helpful and informative which gave the whole process a lot friendlier veneer.

Overall I believe that the way that the University carries out the enrollment of new pupils is a very well structured approach which in fact makes the student feel more at ease at this new and exciting chapter in their lives.