1. INSTRUCTOR:
       Dr. John Butler
        OFFICE:
            448 Fisher Hall, Fisher College of Business, The Ohio State University,
            Columbus, Ohio 43210
        OFFICE HOURS:
            Thursday 2:30 - 3:30 and by appointment
        OFFICE PHONE:
            (614) 688-8679
        E-MAIL:
      butlerj@cob.ohio-state.edu
         the subject of all messages must be AMIS 651

2. COURSE TEXTS:

1. Required text: Systems Analysis and Deisgn: An Active Approach (2nd edition) by George M. Marakas; and my lecture notes.
2. This syllabus serves as an interactive entry point into all materials covered in this class. It WILL be updated frequently during the quarter, so check often for new links, notes, messages, and other related material.

The focus of this course is the study of systems, and the principles of systems analysis and design. This course introduces you to organizational systems analysis and design, and presents ideas that provide powerful insights about a large spectrum of analysis and design issues. This course aims to give you a feeling for the problems and techniques of systems analysis and design, and the application of such techniques to real life business analysis problems.

4. STUDENT RESPONSIBILITIES:

	You are expected to have read carefully the assigned portion of the book prior to coming to class (and I encourage you to discuss it with friends); most of the class time will be devoted to the discussion of applications and extensions of the material in the book.
	You are expected to complete all assignments. Some assignments are to be completed in teams. Submit only one report per group.
	You may work on assignments together (for example, discuss how to work a problem or rough out a solution), but every group must turn in work that is written up individually. Solutions to these problems may not be “copied” and “pasted” by multiple groups.  The purpose of the assignments is not to find a solution on the Internet or from students who took this class previously.  If you do find some useful information on the web or from another source it should be referenced!  Evidence of cheating in any form will be met with serious punishment including formal channels at the University level.

5. GRADING POLICY:

	Tentative allocation of points.  Depending on time available I may remove some assignments.  In the event that this happens, those points will simply be subtracted from the total available for the class Tentative Midterm #1: 100 Midterm #2: 100 Homework problems: 36 (4 problem finding; 8 MP3 value hierarchy; 4 project proposal; 20 process & data modeling) Final Exam/Project 150 Experimental Participation 15
	No makeup quizzes will be given.  Quizzes cannot be taken early.  No late assignments will be accepted.  No electronic submissions will be accepted unless specially requested of all students.
	If an assignment is added or deleted, those points will simply be added or subtracted from the total.
	No extra credit will be given but at the end of the quarter all students will have the option to complete a final project worth 200 points.  Students pursuing this strategy will not be able to choose between which of the two grades is higher; they must accept the grade which includes the project.  In other words, they had better be good!

6. TENTATIVE SCHEDULE:
 

Week	Date	Topic	Readings	Notes	Assignments Due
1	Sep 22	Intro to Systems Analysis andDesign	Chapter 1	chap1.ppt
2	Sep 27	Problem Identification	Chapter 2	chap2.ppt chap2EX.doc
	Sep 29	Cross-cutting Activities	Appendix A	appA.ppt
3	Oct 4	Selecting IS/IT Projects	Chapter 3	chap3.ppt	complete chap2EX.doc bring printed copy to class  see example answers below
	Oct 6	Requirements Analysis	Chapter 4	chap4.ppt
4	Oct 11	Value Focused Thinking (VFT)	VFT seagate.pdf VFT ecommerce.pdf	VFT.ppt
	Oct 13	Estimation and Biases	Chapter8; pp. 219-235	Estimation.ppt
5	Oct 18	Midterm #1
	Oct 20	Modeling the Processes	Chapter 5	chap5.ppt
6	Oct 25	Modeling the Data	Chapter 6	chap6.ppt	bring a picture of your means-ends hierarchy for an MP3 player Use Means-Ends.ppt to help think
	Oct 27	Examples of Process and Data Modeling	Chapters 5 & 6	models.ppt bring a printout of this file to class
7	Nov 1	Object Oriented Analysis and Design	Appendix B	appB.ppt
	Nov 3	Design for Diverse Environments;CASE Tools	Chapter 9; Chapter 7	chap9.ppt; chap7.ppt
8	Nov 8	Design Concepts	Chapters 10 &11	chap10.ppt chap11.ppt	project proposal due 1/2 to 1 page outline/summary I also need a list of group members (only hand in one copy per group)
	Nov 10	Design Concepts	Chapters 12 &13	chap12.ppt chap13.ppt
9	Nov 15	Midterm #2
	Nov 17	Thinking like an Accountant		WE WILL MEET IN MASON HALL 321	DFD and ERD asignment due
10	Nov 22	Thinking like an Accountant		AISview.ppt
	Nov 24	Thanksgiving
11	Nov 29	Project Presentations	1. Grumbles & Hearn 2. Schragal 3. Bonds, Martin & Velasquez
	Dec 1	Project Presentations	1. Carillo & Kolenko 2. Manion & Schroeder 3. Toth, Amdur & Blair 4. Cooper, Dietrich & Patel
	Dec 7	Final Project due by 3:00 pm

7. ARRANGEMENTS FOR ASSIGNMENTS:

Assignments may be completed in groups or individually depending on the specific assignment. Only one report is to be submitted per group when a team is used. To prevent free-riding the group may be split at any time during the quarter, by written notification to the professor. Free-riding is further discouraged in that questions from the assignments will appear on the exams, and peer-evaluation will be solicited.

Note that some assignments might take more than a few hours to finish. You should submit the required material to your professor. The assignments are due at the beginning of the class session. No late assignments will be accepted - no exceptions.

8. MESSAGES:

10/04/05 5:45 pm I graded your assingments and most of you did very well.  One thing to remember, when you think about the PIECES framework you're looking to see whether P, I, E, C, E, or S causes the observed symptom not whether the symptom would fall into one of those categories.  This is somewhat subtle but here's an example.  It's much better to say that poor efficiency causes us to have multiple contracts than to say that having multiple contracts would cause economic issues.  There's no real mention of a need to control costs or profits although you might argue that a symptom is less donations that we could have.

Example of answers for part b)
1 b)

• Information - data is out of control little information on donations or donors
• Control - possible privacy issues since donations are the issue
• Efficiency - multiple contacts for several donors; each department doing it's own fund raising
• Service - bad reputation with donors

•  Valerie should have insisted on getting the users involved, and if the owners continually declined those wishes, elevated the matter to management.

• To save time they decided to skip the survey, study, definition, configuration, and design phases and go straight to construction.

• Based on the narrative no formal mechanisms of assigning/identifying phases and activities was used.

• This was not done either for the sake of time and money.

• The document they called a feasibility report was actually a proposal to implement the only solution they investigated. When a single solution is presented, it is easy to be over-optimistic and over-committal. No alternatives were investigated.

• The Creeping Commitment approach to have multiple feasibility checkpoints where the analyst should consider cancellation, reevaluation of costs, and reduction of scope. There were no feasibility checkpoints and once they had already spent $150,000 they felt if stupid to cancel the project. A fundamental rule of finance is that all money spent so far is sunk - it can't be recovered. You don't waste new money trying to salvage a disastrous investment.

• The project was not divided into sub-systems in order to more easily conquer the problem and build the larger system.

• Since there wasn’t a formal design phase, this was never addressed.

09/07/05 Here are a couple of organizations that are related to Systems Analysis and Design

• Project Management Institute
• Software Engineering Institute