THE WALLACE E. CARROLL SCHOOL OF MANAGEMENT
MD 240: Management Information Systems
Fall 2000

MD 240
Group Consulting Project

Your Project Team:
You will be asked to form groups of 5 students each. While the natural tendency is to pick a group made up of your friends, this may or may not work well. You may want to make sure that your group has a mixture of people with tendencies toward project management ("Team Manager"), concept development and brainstorming ("Concept People"), and abilities to adapt technologies to create systems ("Techie Types").

Your Client Organization:
Your group will pick a client who has a problem that you believe could be solved using IT. This must be a real organization with a real problem.

(1) Perhaps a relative or friend of a team member works for a company that would allow you access.
(2) It could be an organization for which someone on your team has worked.
(3) You might pick an organization someone has a current or past non-work related affiliation with (e.g., a school, community group, or non-profit organization).
(4) You might want to contact people in organizations you have an interest in working for.
(5) You might want to contact recent graduates who are working in MIS.
(6) You might pick an organization based on your experience as a consumer.
(7) Finally, the BC community itself can provide interesting consulting opportunities.

While your problem should be complex enough to be a good learning experience, you should not pick a problem that is so complex that you end up doing a superficial job.

Try to pick a problem that all of the members of your team can get excited about. Research shows that design project teams are often much more effective when everyone in the team is "On Board", or has been picked because they really want to work on the project. Because you must work on a project, it becomes important to choose something that each member of the team will have a great interest in doing.

I will be available to help you with your project process, project politics, ideas for leads, ideas for your presentation, and so on. If you need help finding a client organization, please let me know.

Goal:
The goal of this project is for you to experience first-hand the elements of the Software/Systems Development Life Cycle (SDLC) process, and then communicate your results with a presentation and write-up. To accomplish the project, you will go through the steps of the SDLC as described on pages 603-610 of the text. The components of the project are as follows:

(1) Project Initiation: You will provide a high level overview of the vision for the new system (a Vision Statement), including a problem statement and a description of the goals of the new system.
(2) Systems Analysis and Feasibility Studies: You will provide a description of how the current systems will be affected, and a discussion of costs versus benefits of the old and new systems. You also will analyze the feasibility of the envisioned system.
(3) Logical Analysis and Design: You will analyze and model the current system and the proposed system on a logical level.
(4) Acquisition or Development: You will describe your technical solution. A prototype of part or all of the proposed system can be nice here, but is not required. You should also create a list of documents that will need to be created to enable documentation and training with the system.
(5) Implementation, (6) Operation, (7) Post-Audit Evaluation, and (8) Maintenance: You will just provide a recommended plan for how the organization should do these steps. These steps will have less emphasis placed on them, as this is a management and not a programming class.

Here are some examples of documents and personal experiences of friends of mine who are or have been systems developers that might help you get a better idea of what you might end up doing during the SDLC.

Example #1: A request for a proposal for an actual MIS engagement (edited for confidentiality) similar to what you'll be doing
Example #2: A response to a Request For Proposal (RFP)

Experience #1 - Designer/Concept Person/Program Coder
Experience #2 - Systems Maintenance
Experience #3 -
Your System Developer Experience Reports
Your End-User Experience Reports

The Project Process:
(1) Brainstorm on potential organizations for your project. Prioritize the ideas and pursue leads. Call me if you need some leads. You must delegate one person to be the project manager. You may want to designate another person to be in charge of controlling any documents produced during the project.
(2) Arrange for an interview with a contact person in the organization. Managers are often quite busy, so it may take a while to get an appointment set up. Start early and be persistent. Once the interview is scheduled, make sure that you are prepared for the interview with questions you may have about the organization's needs, their objectives, their desired budget, etc. Do not go in unprepared and waste the manager's time. Assign one person to record or take notes of the meeting.
(3) Prepare and submit a Vision Statement and Project Plan to me.
(4) At this point, you will be sequentially working on the stages of the SDLC.
(5) During subsequent meetings with your contact, present your work in progress, ask your contact to comment on whether your plans are "on the right track," take notes, and ask for copies of documents or pictures you are shown. (In some cases, you may be asked to sign confidentiality statements. Please talk to me about this if it arises.) Before you leave a meeting, ask if you can phone back later with any follow-up questions.
(6) Work on your write-up and prepare your presentation. Often this will involve picking and choosing between the materials you have created and gathered during your project. Call your contact to check facts and figures, to clear up loose ends. Rehearse your presentation and proofread your report.
(7) Turn in your write-up, and deliver your presentation to the class.
(8) Download the team evaluation form and fill it out.
(9) When you finish the project, you will probably be asked to send a finalized copy of your report to the contact at your client organization. Send a copy of the report, as well as a thank you note.

Project Roles:
Teams often include a variety of individuals who take on different roles in the teams. Your team should decide who will take on what roles, and which roles are needed for the project.
(1) Team Leader/Project Manager: This person is responsible for coordinating team members and creating and updating the project plan.
(2) Concept People/Systems Analysis/Systems Design: Certain people may concentrate on the more abstract tasks involved in analyzing and modeling the envisioned system on paper.
(3) Document Management: Knowledge work often involves the creation of many documents, and the dissemination of those documents to team members. This role often includes document control, in which one must make sure that documents are archived as they are created, and that two individuals are not editing the same document at the same time, thereby potentially corrupting the other's work.
(4) Implementation People: These people often have some experience in the actual creation of systems. People who have worked on programming may be assigned to these roles. These people often have to help the Concept People understand the nuts and bolts of how IT actually works together, and not just the vision of how it might work.

Managing Your Project's Timeline:
An ideal schedule for the group project is as follows:
(1) By the end of September or mid-October, select a client for your project and interview your client to find out the nature of the business, the kinds of problems the organization faces, and possible IT remedies;
(2) By mid November, define the particular problem you will address, research possible IT solutions, and present options to the client to get feedback;
(3) Reserve the end of November for finalizing your proposed solution, and developing your write up and presentation.

Your team may want to use some sort of project management software to help with controlling this project (and to experience such software). My suggestion is to try out eRoom.net (if it is still free). eRoom.net is in a free trial period for their project management systems, and has templates that you might use to put together and store documents for this project.

Deliverables:
The deliverables for this project are (1) a vision statement and project plan, (2) a write-up of the project, (3) a presentation of your findings to the class, and (4) a team evaluation form for reviewing the performance of your fellow team members.

The Vision Statement and Project Plan:
Vision statements help to describe the general concept of the IS project and what strategic value the project has to the organization. Your project plan should briefly outline the steps that you plan to take during the semester in order to complete the project. The project plan may include a timeline of the project or a simple Gantt chart that can help visualize the order of the steps. While a vision statement and project plan can often end up being 50-100 pages in a corporate project, this report need not be more than a page or two. Your project plan should also include a list of your team members, and the roles they will play in the team.

The Write-Up:
The write-up for your project will consist of eight sections, one for each stage of the SDLC. Your full write-up should be no more than 5 pages of single spaced text, although you can attach diagrams on additional pages. Typically, the first four sections will be longer than the last four.

The Presentation:
Your group will present your findings in a 15 minute in-class presentation, to be followed by a 5 minute question and answer period. In the presentation you will cover the same five topics as the write-up, although here again, it is not necessary (or even recommended) to devote equal time to each stage. It is better to devote more time to the most important and interesting elements of your project.

It is critical that the presentation be well designed and rehearsed for length. A common problem with team project presentations is that teams try to say too much, and/or are not well rehearsed for what they do say. The best solution to this is to time your presentation during several practice runs. This practice helps you cut out extraneous material, and decide on what material is most interesting, informative, and relevant to telling the "story" of your project.

Team Evaluation Form:
At the end of the semester you will be asked to evaluate the contribution of the other members of your group, and using that evaluation and my own observation, certain group members may have their grades for the group project adjusted.