Systems science

The difficulty of assignment one is behind you. Now you are much more aware and so all assignments from here forward will be completed with greater facility and automaticity. The greatest challenge of the last assignment was distinguishing between that which is concrete and that which is abstract, figuring out exactly what is part of the materials flow and what is part of the information flow.

Assignment Two is all about time. The challenge here will be distinguishing between that which is process time and that which is clock time. In this assignment, you will distinguish among data, information, knowledge, and wisdom.

As with all assignments, your personal information is not required but realistic percentages may help complete the assignment more easily.

The following are Mary’s seven steps to complete the structural foundation from which to document your expenditure of time past and your forecast for the future. These steps will be reiterated in successive assignments as they are foundational.

1. Identify objectives/purpose.

2. To achieve utmost clarity, identify what is in scope and what is definitely out of scope.

3. To provide the temporal range, identify the start date and end date.

4. Requirements – the list to which time management must align (policies, restrictions,

limitations).

5. Assumptions (for example, you need at least six hours sleep each day).

6. Any other components you want to include.

7. Identify the process by which you are going to manage this finite resource – for example,

stakeholders’ review.

As with the last assignment, this assignment is worth 5%, where the majority of the marks will be allocated to completeness of the above seven steps (2%) and especially the reflective piece (3%) identifying the process you followed to complete the assignment, including frustrations, questions which supported forward movement, false starts, the best and the worst of the experience, and what you will stop, start, and continue for next time. This assignment should reflect a definite increase in your awareness of the issues faced by a systems analyst. You should be incorporating some of the vocabulary we are using during lecture. And you awareness of how to put boundaries around an issue in order to define a problem should be emerging with an idea of how you will apply your learning to the future.
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