INFO203 Business and System Analysis

Purpose: The purpose of a sketchbook in system analysis and design is to give you a space to think about different elements of your project. A sketchbook serves as documentation or evidence of the evolvement of your thinking. You can use it as a stimulus for dialogue with yourself during your analysis and design journey. You can also use it for dialogue between you and others in workshops, activity-based discussion sessions, etc.

Task: In the following weeks (weeks 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 9, and 10), during the second half of Firday’s activity-based discussion, you will receive questions and work on those questions. Instructors will be around and offer tips and answer questions you may have.

Evaluation: Your sketchbook is a vehicle for evolving reflection on your analysis and design process. We are NOT looking for complete, perfect or structured answers.

Instead, we expect to see thoughts and a rough plan of attack. You can put down drawings and provide a brief explanation. For questions that you may not have answers to, you may discuss how you are going to make progress. There is no page limit for the sketchbook. It can be concise and to the point, or it can contain many notes and drawings. The bottom line is that you benefit from this exercise and move your project forward.

There are three questions each week. Each question is worth 1%.

•   Satisfactory (1%) – an understanding of the question and providing relevant responses

•   Unsatisfactory (0.5%) – completely irrelevant

•   Invalid (0%) – not submitted or random text

The table below shows three questions for Week 2. To give you an idea:

•   For Q1 you could begin to think about your Information Gathering Plan, which includes the information you’d like to gather, where you might get this information from (the sources – primary and/or secondary), how you’ll get this information (techniques such as interviews, observations, document analysis,    etc.), and the order in which you will gather it.

•   For Q2 you can focus on the information a bit more, considering how you’re going to gather it, and the type of information it is (will you use primary and/or secondary information, and where will you get it from, i.e. news sources as a secondary data source, and/or interviews, observations, etc. as a primary source). You should also try to describe why you are collecting that information.

•   And for Q3, you can start to think about the characteristics of your stakeholders, which can include their role in the cost of living crisis (i.e. are   they users, developers, etc.?), some use cases (i.e. what role does information systems currently play?), their motivation for tackling the cost of living crisis, and how do they behave when considering these challenges.