Milestone
Project Milestone: Project plan. Submit your project plan. The project plan is a Word document that is a combination of a written explanation of the project plan and the explanation of the control plan. The WBS and timeline are represented with screenshots of the Gantt chart, resource chart, and cost table. Ensure each chart and graph is properly noted and has text explanation.
Note that the course project intent is to introduce students to an entire systems analyst process. Each milestone is fairly significant in size if performing an actual project. For the intended learning and exposure to the course project topics, please know that assumptions will have to be made and that any such assumptions should be documented.
For additional details, please refer to the Final Project Document and the Milestone Two Guidelines and Rubric document in the Assignment Guidelines and Rubrics section of the course.
Specifically the following critical elements must be addressed:
IV. Project Plan: Illustrate your recommended implementation and management strategies. Be sure to include screenshots of all relevant diagrams, charts, and tables.
a) Work Breakdown Structure: Describe all of the essential roles and functions required for implementing the solution. Who will be doing the work and what, specifically, will they need to do?
b) Project Monitoring and Control Plan: How are you going to ensure that the project is going smoothly? What is your plan of attack to ensure that all controls are adhered to? What is the defined critical path? Be sure that you frame your response for communicating effectively to your target audiences.
C) Timeline: What is the estimated amount of time for implementation? Create a visual representation that captures your timeline (e.g., Gantt chart) based on the systems development life cycle.
Guidelines for Submission: Milestone Two should follow these formatting guidelines: 3-4 pages, double-spacing, 12-point Times New Roman font, one-inch margins, and citations in APA.
Instructor Feedback: This activity uses an integrated rubric in Blackboard. Students can view instructor feedback in the Grade Center. For more information, review
REVIEW AND TIPS FROM PROF
This is one of my favorite parts of the course. As a former enterprise architect and current internal controls manager, I too often find zero documentation for existing critical systems and those yet to be built. Too little documentation leads to too many meetings. The last thing an IT person wants to do is to sit in meetings. The best way to avoid those meetings is for the systems analyst to capture the prospective system in a series of diagrams before the first line of code is written. Conversely, if an existing system is targeted for and update, the systems analyst should document the current state (also referred to as an as-is-analysis) followed by the future state. Analyzing the difference between the current state and future state is called a gap analysis and that gap is what the systems implementation project is intended to fill. Make sense?
The specific types of diagrams that capture the current and future state vary. The course textbook has some excellent examples, so please read Chapter 5 carefully. You can use either the Gane and Sarson symbol set or the Yourdon symbol set. Use Microsoft Visio to create your context diagram. Then, as in previous submissions place that diagram in a Word document along with your decision table. There is an excellent example of a decision table in the course textbook. Review it carefully. Everything you create this week should be in a single document. However, you cannot begin to execute the diagram on Page 188 until you really understand the purpose of the shapes described in the previous pages. Although you must use one of the symbol sets from the course textbook to complete your assignment, be aware there are other notation methods. One method is standardized by the Object Management group (the same organization that standardizes the Uniform Modeling Language) is called Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN). It is a great standard agreed upon by the major manufacturers of business process software. You can check out my LinkedIn page (click My Instructor on the BlackBoard navigation pane) for a link to a BPMN article I wrote a few years ago if you want to know more.
This week you will also be completing your project plan. The basic idea for this assignment is not to get too fancy. Much like Sgt. Joe Friday from the sixties series Dragnet (Google it for laughs) you should focus on "just the facts." I do not want you go get too carried away with colors and other superficial facets of the assignment. As always, the key to making a good grade is to read the grading rubric first, do your reading, and build your submission towards the targets specified by the grading rubric. Before you submit, go back and match the critical elements in the rubrics to your submission. As always, good luck and have fun with this week's assignments.