Introduction |Objectives |Class Organization |Assessment |Project

Prototyping projects

The course divides into roughly three phases. The first phase introduces database design and analysis tools while providing exposure to Microsoft Access, a relational database prototyping application available at Babson. The second phase focuses on process analysis techniques used for process redesign. The third phase focuses on project completion.

You will be asked to complete a page-long project prospectus that can be distributed to members of the class by the fifth session of the course (Tuesday, 8 October). We will discuss the requirements for this prospectus in more detail during the early class sessions, but please begin to think about potential project topics now. The ideal topic is one that meets the following conditions:

• Strategic importance. It involves a business process that is of obvious strategic importance to a business unit or company.
• Detailed knowledge. It is a process that you know in detail or can research in detail during the course of the term.
• Redesign needed. A redesign of the process is necessary and practical, and represents a context within which information technology offers meaningful leverage.
• Interesting. The process involves business objectives or activities of considerable personal interest to you, and potentially interesting to other managers.
• Manageable. The process can be understood in small enough scope (or a piece of it can be appropriately explained in context) to make a manageable project for a 14-session course. If you have questions about the size of your project topic, start broad and narrow later. The process analysis techniques that we will use in the course will help you manage project scope.

A large portion of this course is devoted to designing and developing a prototype information system (based on a database) that supports process redesign within the scope of a predefined development project. The prototype will be delivered as

1. Report: report that discusses the reasoning behind the process design and the prototype, including a suggested scenario of the prototype in use and
2. Prototype: a working disk file of the prototype that can be used in system demonstrations. At minimum, the report will have the following sections:

Report section	Subsections
Narrative and discussion	Problem statement Process description (current process) Process analysis Process explanation (redesigned process)
Supporting exhibits	Process analysis: Activity hierarchy Specialization hierarchy Dependency analysis Trade-off analysis Data flow diagrams Data structure/entity-relationship diagrams Table designs
Demonstration descriptions	Scenario description Scenario script

An alternative outline for the report is included below. This outline was developed by previous sections of the course using collaboration software. The page counts in the table are preliminary. They are not intended as requirements, but are included to give you a better feel for the scope of the project.

	Estimated page count
Report Section		Low	High
a. Executive summary		1	2
b. Introduction		1	2
c. Problem statement		1	1
d. Process description (current process)		2	3
e. Process analysis		1	2
f. Process explanation (redesigned process)		1	2
g. Process representation		2	5
h. Specialization analysis		1	3
i. Dependency analysis		1	3
j. Key trade-offs		1	3
k. Data flow analysis		2	4
l. Data structure analysis		1	3
m. Table designs		1	3
n. Scenario description		1	2
o. Scenario discussion		1	2
p. Summary and conclusion		1	2
Estimated report size		19	42