Systems Analysis

This is individual work, ongoing through out the semester. Roughly 250 words per note, submitted on the course site before the meeting the reading supports. Credit / no credit. There are nine readings; seven of your reading notes must earn credit.

The prompt for each note is the same all semester:

Name one thing in this reading you think is wrong, or one place where our situation doesn’t fit what the author describes. This is not a summary. If you agree with everything in the reading, you haven’t read closely enough.

Notes that summarize get no credit. Two notes can be missed entirely, or earn no credit, with no penalty. Below seven, each shortfall costs one seventh of this component of your grade.

Group posting to Zulip. Not graded, but important: both finding-out portfolios, the relevant systems your group commits to on 10/7, and the models built from them are all affected by this statement.

In four or five sentences:

Name the aspect of the merger your group is inquiring into for the rest of the term:

1. curriculum
2. advising and student services
3. student organizations
4. internships and field experiences
5. external communications
6. internal communications

… or one of your own design, as long as students can see into it, and if the people who know about it would talk frankly to an undergraduate. Faculty hiring, tenure cases and budget lines fail the second test.

Say what your survey of potential sources found on it.

Say what the survey failed to find that you expected to be there.

Name the roles of the people who would have to talk with you for this inquiry to go further than just documents.

Group deliverable, in two parts.

Analysis One — your inquiry. Who are the clients, who are the practitioners, and who are the issue owners in your group’s inquiry into the aspect you committed to? The list of issue owners is a choice, not a discovery, and different choices open different inquiries. Say what your choice opens and what it closes off, including who is affected but not consulted.

Then one paragraph on the choice of aspect: what your aspect made available to this analysis, and what taking a different aspect would have put on the issue-owner list that is not on it now.

Source inventory. The documents your group has gathered, each with its date and its audience noted. Public announcements, org charts, strategic plans, curricular filings, faculty governance minutes, news and student-newspaper coverage, alumni communications, etc.

Sources you gathered before committing to your aspect belong here too, whether or not they bear on it: what you gathered and could not use is evidence about where this school writes things down.

Assessed on: whether the three roles (client, practitioner, issue owner) are argued as choices rather than reported as findings; whether the affected-but-not-consulted question is answered with parties specific enough to say what they would want; whether the inventory records date and audience rather than just listing links.

Your group’s first rich picture of our situation, drawn by hand in the room and photographed.

Graded on completion only. Rich pictures are instruments of thought, not products. Grading their quality would teach you to draw pictures that look like good rich pictures, which is the opposite of the point.

Photograph the picture at the end of every working session and date the file. The iteration memos require you to reproduce an earlier artifact and say what was wrong with it, which is impossible if the only rich picture that exists is the current one.

The second version of your group’s rich picture, redrawn in light of what finding out has turned up.

Graded on completion only. Keep the dated photograph of v1—you will need it.

The final version of your group’s rich picture, redrawn in light of everything since v2.

Graded on completion only.

The situation is not what it was in August, partly because we have been inquiring into it. That is not a methodological failure; it is the condition of all such inquiry.