Management of IT Systems and Projects

Assignment - Tool critique

Task

The Chief Information Officer (CIO) is not the IT project manager, but you are. The CIO would like an evaluation from you of project management tools in the marketplace - their strenths, weaknesses and so forth. You need to prepare a report for the CIO that critiques four such project management (PM) tools along the lines of MS Project, Jira, Trac, GitHub, GoogleCode and so on. You are not limited to these tools and in fact may choose others you feel are more appropriate.

Weighted Scoring Model

Additionally as part of your report for the CIO you need to include a weighted scoring model (see week 4 lectures) to help explain how you arrived at your decision - as to what you thought the best four tools were and why. The parameters you use in your weighted scoring model are up to you, but there should be no less than five (5) of them, and the parameters you evaluate the tools on should be appropriate to the sort of tools you are evaluating.

Consider the sort of material we have covered over the chapters of Schwalbe during the first half of semester, you may choose any of these 12 chapters as the sorts of parameters in your weighted scoring model, e.g. cost, time, scope, quality, risk etc. with regard to what the PM tools do and don't provide. You do not have to use the Schwalbe chapters as the context, you may choose to use others - such as tool integration, import and export capability, methodology driven capabilities, dictionary support, add-ins/plugins etc. The choice is yours!

Appendix 1

Writing at university level means academic writing. Academic writing is not like writing a novel. Informal writing styles are not encouraged. You are required to substantiate what you write/say in your academic and professional lives. It is only in rare instances where you will be permitted to write works of fiction at university, it is also for similar reasons that the first person singular (I feel, I think, I did, My feeling is ...), is generally to be avoided in writing university assignments (there are some exceptions to this rule, for example law faculties often adopt the first-person-singular in their writing style).

As insulting as this may seem, as a student you are not considered to be an expert at anything (that usually comes with the title Dr. and then later Professor). The point is you need to state the source of your information in assignments. Furthermore it is generally considered politically-correct to avoid gender-specific writing styles; in other words don't refer to authors/people/whoever as he, unless they actually are male - examine the following link at the foot of the page.

For the purposes of this assignment, we will use the Harvard referencing style, although if you are comfortable with footnoting, please do so.

Citing vs. quoting

1. Where an idea is ‘adopted/adapted' from an author but restated in your words one uses citing as a means of establishing where the information was derived from. For example

...... Smith (1990) was inclined to believe that ... blah blahblah, ... (where blah blahblah are your words, but the author's ideas). No page number needs to be included for citing authors (but you must include the author's surname, and date of publication of the reference where you have derived the information from).

No, you cannot cite your friends (or lecture/tutorial/practical material).

2. Where the words have simply been lifted/copied directly by you, is referred to as quoting someone. For example ..... it was felt that "of all the database schemas, the object relational approach is ....." (Zhang, 1990 p. 53). In this case quotation marks are used as well as a page number stating where the information directly came from.

Where you have quote that is longer than say 20 words, you indent these as a separate paragraph from the main body of your text and you single space the block quote, like so

When faced with a small problem domain, system development can be all about modeling of user functional requirements. However, when faced with a large problem domain, such as with an enterprise information system, system development must recognize the demands placed on it by the non-functional system qualities. The quality of interest in this paper is supportability (Maciaszek and Liong, 2003; Maciaszeket al., 2004). Supportability is really the combination of three qualities - understandability, maintainability and scalability. An unsupportable system is a legacy system (Maciaszek, 2005 p. 17).

Bibliography/Reference list

The minimumlevel of detail for each book/journal reference used in either a list of references or bibliography is as follows.

For a book:

Busch, P., (2008) Tacit Knowledge in Organizational Learning IGI-Global Hershey Pennsylvania U.S.A.

For a journal article/conference paper:

Venkitachalam, K., Busch, P., (2012) "Tacit Knowledge: Review and Possible Research Directions" Journal of Knowledge Management 16(2) pp: 357-372.

For electronic publications (e.g. ones you've pulled off the internet):

Busch, P., (2006) "Organisation Design and Tacit Knowledge Transferal: An Examination of Three IT Firms" Journal of Knowledge Management Practice 7(2) URL: http://www.tlainc.com/articl111.htm (accessed 21/3/16).