The system development life cycle Methodology

The purpose of the Session Long Project is to give you the opportunity to explore the applicability of the Module to your own life, work, and place in space and time, and to experiment with the Module to see how the otherwise academically rigorous presentation of a topic may, with more or less work and/or trauma, become "up close and personal".

This is done in a number of different ways-sometimes cumulative papers, sometimes practical hands-on experimentation with a tool of some sort, sometimes reflections on a place of work or life. The common thread is personal application, aimed at demonstrating a cumulative knowledge and understanding of the course's material.

For this course, you will be working on a single cumulative project. Each Module will involve its further development. The purpose of the project is to let you practice your analysis and development methodology application and to meld the results into a coherent and professional deliverable that demonstrates what you have learned.

What you are going to do is dream up and prepare requirements and select a methodology for a new information system application-and the process you go through will mirror, in outline, the steps in the systems development process that you are learning about in this course.

Session Long Project

For Module 1, your assignment is to conceptualize a hypothetical information system project and describe its context and purpose. You can design the project for your own organization, an organization that you or someone you know is familiar with, or even for your own imaginary business. Remember, you need to consider both key aspects of information systems-namely information requirements and development methodology.

If you have difficulties dreaming up such a project, you can go someplace interesting or where you already know the people. Spend maybe a half-hour looking at how information is used there. Identify all of the information resources that people are using.

Talk to the people if you can. Where do they get the information they use? How do they use it? What other kinds of information might they find useful? What could they do with it? What kinds of futuristic information services would be useful to them? If you are constrained by location and cannot go to interesting places, you might think of a virtual place such as an online

forum, or a portal site, etc., and imagine what information services could be helpful to the users there. You may even email to some of the users to obtain additional information if you would like. Or you can simply think what futuristic information services would be useful and successful to an existing organization.

Once you have already got some ideas, discuss them with your classmates (via discussions for instance), your coworkers, friends, relative, or the folks behind you in the line at Starbucks. Of course, you may also contact the faculty for their initial feedback. If you have difficulties coming up with your own project, your professor can help as well.

Once you've got a pretty solid idea about the project you'd like to formulate, please prepare a 2- to 3-page paper describing your hypothetical information system project.

Make sure to include:

what the project is about including bounderies

what information gathering you see as needed to make it work how the information will be USED for system requirements

what are the key features of the organizational context of the project why the project is useful

why the project will be successful

SLP Assignment Expectations

Your assignment will be graded according to the MSITM SLP Grading Rubric, which aligns with the following expectations. (To see the rubric, go to Assessments>Rubrics. Click the arrow next to the rubric name and choose Preview.)

LENGTH: 2-3 pages typed and double-spaced The following items will be assessed in particular:

The degree to which you have carried out the assignment completely, or clarified why you could not and investigated alternatives

Your ability to describe your project clearly and develop your recommendations systematically

Your ability to focus on the overall purposes of the assignment, not just its specific steps

If you use any written references, please cite all your sources properly. General Case and SLP Paper Writing Guidelines