Assignment 2 is marked!

This morning I have sent you all an email with a link to your marksheet for Assignment 2.  If you don’t get the email or if you have any problems accessing the document or if you have any questions or comments for me, please email me.

I have had 8 submissions for Assignment 3 already  – THANK YOU! – looking forward to getting the rest soon!.

Assignment 3 Due date

It has been pointed out to me that there is some confusion over the due date for this assignment.  Both the assignment document and the course outline show it as Tuesday June 20 which was my intention.  However the blog sidebar and the Moodle dropbox show it as June 22 (which is Thursday).

It is very difficult for me to have this assignment marked in time for the results meeting if I can’t start marking on Wednesday (marking has to be completed by Monday afternoon – so if I don’t start until Friday it is really pushing things!).  Therefore I will be VERY grateful to have your assignments submitted as early as possible – however I think it would be unfair to penalise anyone who submits on Thursday.

So in a nutshell, you do have until Thursday midnight to complete the assignment but I would really encourage you to submit it before then if you possibly can.  I will start the marking as soon as the first ones appear.

By the way I am now working my way through Assignment 2 marking and hope to have the results to you early next week. Many thanks for understanding 🙂

Let’s get Agile!

Introduction to Assignment 3 this morning and setting up something for next week will be where we start today.

Then we will move on to look at Agile development.

Notes are here

Week 10 – Still soft

This week we are going to complete our look at Soft Systems Methodology by considering Root Definitions, what they are and how we create them.  My notes are here.

Next week (Week 11)  we will be looking at Agile Development and I will be talking through Assignment 3.  Please take time to look at the Assignment 3 brief before next week.

See you soon.

Week 9 Softly, softly……

As we move away from looking at the more traditional forms of systems development, I want to introduce a method that although not strictly a systems development methodology as such, is incredibly useful for helping us to understand a ‘mess’.  It enables us to take a broad, informal view of a situation or an organisation and assist us to identify where problems might occur (or be occurring) and where intervention might be valuable.  It helps us to see where and what  ‘problems’ might exist which allows us to use more conventional methods to build appropriate systems.

I am referring to Soft Systems Methodology, and in particular the technique of creating Rich Pictures – that is what we will be doing today!

My notes will be here eventually!

Week 7 Update

I’m sorry but I am not going to make it to class today.  I have shared my class notes with you (see my previous post) as I know some of you are starting to think about Assignment 2 and today’s notes will be useful for that.  Please read my previous post and follow the link from there.

Please take the time to read through the notes and follow up on the various links I have provided.  Next week I will provide a round up and summary of this information and I will discuss assignment 2 with you then.  However, you might like to start thinking about the assignment so that you have some questions for me next week.

Sorry again for not being there today.

Week 7 Structured methodologies (eg SSADM)

I will start this week with a continuation of last week’s history lesson 🙂 Just a short overview of how and when the different methodologies appeared and how they related to the kinds of systems that were being built at the time.

Then I want to look in more detail at structured methodologies of the traditional SDLC, particularly SSADM (Structured Systems Analysis and Design) and the ways in which this still has some relevance but not for all systems!  This leads into the Assignment 2 so I will be talking through the assignment and giving you some hints and tips as well.

If we have time we will look at some example scenarios to see which of them would be suited to the more formal approach of a methodology like SSADM and which are crying out to be more Agile!

Notes will be available here at some point!

History of Systems – Week 6

This week we will be looking at the history of computer systems, leading into the history of systems development and methodologies.  I hope it will be less dry than it sounds 🙂

I will also be debriefing Assignment 1.

Notes will be here eventually!

Assignment 1

Assignment 1 is all marked and you should have received an email this morning with the link to your marksheet.  If the email hasn’t arrived, please make sure to check your live nmit account, please let me know.

I will spend some time discussing this assignment on Thursday and hopefully amazing you with some of the answers that people have come up with!

 

Thinking Systems – Week 5

Today we will be moving closer to the IT world again and looking at what systems are, both computer and non-computer ones, and  how we can characterise and think about them.

This is laying the foundation for our work for the next couple of weeks and leading in to Assignment 2.

Look forward to seeing you later – class notes will be here eventually.