First Day Assignment

In preparation for the first day of class, please:

1. Buy the textbooks and Junk-Van case
2. Do the reading and prepare for class discussion.
3. Think about what skills and interests you will bring to your project team.

I provide the details below but if you have any questions about any of this or about the course, please do not hesitate to contact me at george.wyner@bc.edu.

Buy the textbooks and Junk-Van case

There are two required books for this course, along with a teaching case:

• Applying UML and Patterns: An Introduction to Object-Oriented Analysis and Design and Iterative Development (3rd Edition) by Craig Larman. Prentice-Hall, 2005. ISBN: 9780131489066
• Making I/T Work: An Executive’s Guide by Severance and Passino. Jossey-Bass, 2002. ISBN: 9780470397831
• 1-888-Junk-Van by Derrick Neufeld and Liliana Lopez Jimenez.  Available online Links to an external site. from Harvard Business Publishing.

The textbooks are available at the bookstore.

The teaching case must be purchased from the Harvard Business Publishing website Links to an external site..  The cost is $3.95.  Purchase by going to:  https://cb.hbsp.harvard.edu/cbmp/access/23562072 Links to an external site.

The Larman and Severance books have both been in print for awhile and should also be available as used books for substantial savings (e.g. in area bookstores or online, e.g. Amazon). The Severance book is also available in a Kindle edition from Amazon (although this is not actually cheaper than the printed book).

We will be making extensive use of both books throughout the course. The Larman book is highly regarded as an excellent practical introduction to the Unified Modeling Language (UML), one of the key topics in this course. Previous MI258 students have found Making I/T Work to be an especially useful guide to the actual managerial work of developing and deploying information systems.  In addition there are a number of articles which will be made available through online course reserves.

Prepare for our first class discussion

Our first class discussion will focus on what systems analysis and design actually is and what problems it solves. Why do we need systems analysis and design? Please use the following reading to develop an initial point of view about this question. If you do not see a clear starting place for tackling this question you might focus instead on what goes wrong with software projects and why so many of them fail.

Please come to class with some specific arguments, questions, and examples related to this question.

The readings:

There are three required readings for the first day. Please take a look at each of these but feel free to read selectively. The goal here is to develop a point of view about the discussion question. The comments below are meant to help you focus your reading of this material for maximum effect.

 1. Why Software Fails Links to an external site.. This article in an industry journal (IEEE Spectrum) is an unrelenting chronicle of software disasters. Read about how a software error made a warehouse “disappear.” Look for the list of common causes of failure (“Why do projects fail so often?”). What could you do as a manager to address these issues?

 2. No Silver Bullet Links to an external site. (starts at p.20).  Silver bullets are rumored to kill werewolves. Managers have long been in search of “magical” protection from the monsters which threaten large software projects. Fred Brooks (of whom more later in the course) explains why software is so hard to develop and talks about the most popular proposed “silver bullets.”  (Note:  this link takes you to a pdf file in the online course reserves.  There are two articles in this pdf file.  The silver bullet article can be found starting on p. 20.  If you have any trouble accessing this article, please let me know.  In a pinch you should also be able to find the article here Links to an external site..)  

 3. Making I/T Work, Chapter 1. Meet Brett Berger, CEO of GMI. Brett is about to lose his job and the reason has much to do with IT project failures. GMI is a fictionalized case study used throughout this book (and MI258) to draw together key lessons about how to navigate the challenges of software development. Most of this chapter is a collection of real world examples of IT success and failure: Dell, Cisco, Hershey, Tenneco. This reading focuses our attention on the business context for our IT discussions: how do you pick the right projects for your business? What are the organizational obstacles to successful IT projects? Ask yourself how we might address these issues as system designers and project managers.

And just for fun (and entirely optional):

 • Infamous Software Bugs Links to an external site.

(These readings are all online – follow the links – with the exception of the chapter from Making I/T Work which is one of the required books for the course.)

Think about what skills and interests you will bring to your team

The center piece of MI258 is a team project in which you will work with an actual client to develop software to address a business need. One key piece of business for our first class meeting is to form the project teams. In order to balance skills and interests across teams I have identified four key areas of concern that are important to team functioning. Our goal is to identify people with a strong interest or background in these various areas and make sure that they are distributed among the teams. Also note that if you do not strongly identify with any one of these areas that is perfectly fine. We need lots of “generalists” with broad interests and diverse backgrounds as well.

Please review the following list of skills and rank them in order from 1 to 4, where 1 is the thing you are most interested in / best at and four is the thing you are (comparatively) least interested in.

It is ok to have ties: if you think of yourself as strong in writing and visuals then you can rank them both 1.

This ranking is for your own use. You do not need to turn it in, but I will be asking you to move to certain locations in the classroom based on what you have chosen as 1, 2, and so on, so please have your ranking in mind when you come to class.

Here are the four areas of interest which you should rank yourself on:

Project management. You are good at keeping track of the status of a project including key deliverables, deadlines, and who is doing what. You are good at facilitating meetings and you like to make sure that everyone is on the same page about what has been decided at a meeting. You expect to be involved in keeping your team organized and on track and ensuring that your promises are kept and your deadlines met.

Database & Programming. You have already taken MI257 and APEX and SQL are your friends. Or… you have practical knowledge of working with databases and a strong programming background. You expect to be very involved in developing the prototype for your team’s project.

Writing. You are good with words: writing, editing, polishing, and perfecting written communications. You see yourself playing a major role in transforming discussions, notes, and whiteboards into your team’s written deliverables.

Visuals. You are probably a PowerPoint or Keynote wizard… the go to person when your team needs to craft an impressive slide deck. You might also show your visual talents in web design or photoshop, but however you express them you have a sense of what works visually: colors, layout, graphics. In MI258 we will be drawing some diagrams. In addition to expecting to be involved in developing any slides or visuals for your team, you are most likely the person on your team who will take a messy diagram and move things around to make it more understandable and visually appealing.