Throughout the course, we've taken a look at the various components to doing business analysis. Now is your opportunity to put these together into a final project. In this video, we'll be covering the elements of the project. After the video is over, you'll be able to describe your responsibilities with respect to the analysis for business systems course project. Let's take a look at what that project entails. We're asking you to identify a business process from your personal life, volunteer work, or even your job that could benefit from some level of automation. You should be surrounded by examples of processes that could benefit from automation. You're then going to take that process or that project through the first few steps of analysis. Examples of projects we've seen done in the past come from varied areas, such as supply chain, marketing, education, accounting, technical work, or a non-profit. These are just a few of the ideas to get your thinking started about where a suitable project might lie in your life. If you do choose a project from your professional life, we ask that you choose something that would be non-confidential as you'll be writing up this project, including its requirements and analysis phase deliverables, and it will be reviewed by your classmates. So, please choose something that would be non-confidential. You'll have two major deliverables as part of the project. The first is a statement of work which is roughly equivalent to the feasibility analysis and project plan as we described in the course. It should include project information, such as the sponsor, team members and their roles, the business need, high level business requirements. These are different from system requirements which we'll look at next, and a little bit of estimates of business value. Remember, we talked about the differences between hard benefits and soft benefits. The second major piece and probably the majority of your project deliverable should be your analysis report. In your analysis report, you take what you've learned about writing requirements, writing test cases, and drawing data flow diagrams and entity relationship diagrams, and you try to put those skills to use in your project. We ask that you do two out of these four items in the deliverables. Now, you can do all four if your project calls for it, but not every project calls for every deliverable. Most projects will involve system requirements and then you can pick from test cases, DFDs or ERDs as you see appropriate. Include these in a single document that you will submit online. Your work will be reviewed by three other fellow students. Keep your total length to 10 pages or less. Remember, someone has to read what you wrote. Use standard font and spacing. The goal is to actually make this as short as it possibly can be while still demonstrating command of the course concepts. So, keep brevity in mind as you work on your deliverables. Your work should include a project overview or an executive summary which outlines the business need along with your solution approach. This usually is on the first or second page. You should be able to read this what I call, "On its own." What this means is if someone left your document in the hallway, that whoever picked it up having no knowledge of the domain of the project, would be able to make sense of it. So, we want to include enough background information, keeping in mind the fact that the people reading your deliverable may not necessarily be familiar with the domain or the project, and so be sure that you walk them through it. You should also include some textual analysis and narrative in addition to the diagram components. So, don't, for example, just paste-in your ERD diagram on a page and say, "Here it is." Instead, call the reader's attention to important dimensions of the diagrams that you have via captions or narrative text. You should organize your document like any business document. Have a title page if appropriate, section headings, and a structure and flow to your document that walks the reader through the material. It should look sharp and managerial, remember, you're trying to seek funding for this new project. You should include appendices with any useful detail information that might distract the reader as part of the main flow. We'll also be posting a written description of the project as part of this course, and we wish you good luck as you try to put your skills to use in a real world project.
