(net time: 552 min)           

            Because I had SAP implementation experience in the past, this assignment reminds me of those days writing business requirements and drawing process flow chart. The difference is that all of the information is already listed in the word document “CAR SHARING Case Study”, so I don’t need to hold meeting and process interviews. This makes things much easier.

            The event decomposition technique and CRUD cross-check are two techniques that I feel most useful. If I had learned that before, it would have saved me a lot of time in ERP projects. ERP systems like SAP and Oracle are basically databases, so most of the operations can be described as CRUD. The work process in a company is normally broken down to use cases, and each process has a trigger which is termed “event” in the course. Therefore, I think what is leaned in this course will help one be a good system analyst or ERP consultant.

            The biggest problem I encounter in this assignment is at the beginning when I try to understand what I need to do and which resources I have. In the first 123 minutes, I barely did anything other than the business needs and interface to other systems. Most of the time are spent on reading and thinking. Will this assignment take me 20 hours? But after I read through the details, the following tasks are finished much faster and it takes me 472 minutes to finish the first draft of part A, B and C.

            When I searched discussion forum for some tips, I found that some students recommended to do other assignments first and revert to assignment 1 later. I’m not sure why but I guess that it is because project initiation period is the most difficult period when the whole team struggles with uncertainty based on limited information. In reality, this period requires the most experience from a project manager. It’s easy for an unexperienced project manager to make wrong decision at this stage with too much uncertainty and project failure is mostly doomed no matter how hard to firefight in the following stages. Discharged executives are cluttered with wreckage of organizations that fail to follow this rule.

            BTW, I find that the Athabasca link of IEEE citation reference does not work properly, so I find a new one instead:

https://ieee-dataport.org/sites/default/files/analysis/27/IEEE%20Citation%20Guidelines.pdf