Assignment 1 – Report
Worth: 20%
This is an INDIVIDUAL assignment
Submission instructions: You should submit your assignment via the ICT393 LMS site. You can receive email notification that your assignment has been received. Late submissions will be penalised at the rate of 5 marks per day late or part thereof unless prior approval for an extension has been gained.
You should submit the report as a Word document and ensure that you include your name in the document. You must keep a copy of the final version of your submission and be prepared to provide it on request.
The University treats plagiarism, collusion, theft of other students’ work and other forms of dishonesty in assessment seriously. Urkund will be used to report on potential plagiarism. For guidelines on honesty in assessment including avoiding plagiarism see http://our.murdoch.edu.au/Educational-technologies/Academic-integrity/
Background
Some organisations use very ad hoc approaches to selecting and acquiring software that may result in them not being aware of appropriate products, or in choosing non-optimal software. Using a systematic approach to software evaluation is important to ensure that software that meets organisational requirements.
Later this trimester you will analyse and model a business process from a real organisation and then design improvements to it. The modelling will be done using a visual modelling language for representing processes called BPMN 2.0 (see Topic 5). Undertaking business process modelling and improvement requires appropriate modelling software. This assessment is intended to give you practical experience with evaluating software and also with report writing to document the evaluation process.
To do
To successfully complete this assignment, you should:
- Read the Topic 8 material on software evaluation and acquisition. This will introduce you to the notions of evaluation criteria and the weighted score approach.
- Investigate criteria that might be important in making a decision about which modelling software package to recommend. You should consider what you will need to do to complete the modelling in the Business Process Management and also what has been written by others about selecting this kind of software.
- Choose the set of criteria to be used in the evaluation (note: there must be at least 6). You will need to justify the choice of each criterion in your report.
- Determine the relative importance of each of these criteria for choosing a tool to undertake the Business Process Management. The outcome of this will be a relative weighting for each criterion.
- Identify 3 possible modelling packages that support BPMN 2.0 – these will be your alternatives. Microsoft Visio must be one of them. You must be able to get access to all of them for the purposes of the evaluation – this could be by downloading a full copy (e.g. obtain Visio from Azure Dev Tools), obtaining a trial copy or getting permission to test it on someone else’s machine.
- Use the weighted score method to evaluate your alternatives using the criteria and weightings you have specified. An Excel spreadsheet should be used to support the evaluation and identify which product has the highest ranking. This should use the variation of the weighted score method that includes raw scores and final scores for each criterion (see Topic 8 slides).
- Determine which modelling software package you recommend.
- Create a report based on your evaluation. This must follow the specified structure (see below).
Format Guidelines
- Your report should be clearly written in language suitable for IT professionals to understand.
- Your report should be around 1500 words in length.
- Your report should have the following structure to ensure that it presents the information in a logical and useful way:
- Title page, with a title that clearly reflects its contents.
- Table of contents. This must be generated using the Word Table of Contents feature.
- Introduction. This section should introduce the purpose of the report.
- Criteria. This section should:
- describe how you identified relevant criteria
- provide a brief discussion of potential criteria
- include your final set of criteria (note: there must be at least 6) and why each of them was chosen to include as important in the decision
- Relative importance of criteria. This section should discuss and justify the relative importance of each criteria for choosing a tool to undertake the Business Process Management. It should include the percentage weighting of each criterion.
- Modelling packages. This section should provide a brief description of each of the 3 candidate modelling packages modelling packages that support BPMN 2.0. Microsoft Visio should be one of them.
- Evaluation. This section should briefly describe how you evaluated each software package on of the criteria in order to provide the data for the the weighted score method.
- This section should include a table that documents the outcomes of the evaluation and be supported by a recommendation of which modelling software package is recommended based on the evaluation.
- This should list all the resources you consulted in undertaking the evaluation and writing the report. These should be presented using APA referencing style. Your report should also include citations when you directly quote facts you have obtained from sources – but it is not intended to be an academic essay and should primarily be your work and words. See http://libguides.murdoch.edu.au/APA/ for information about how to reference your sources.
NOTE: Plagiarism is not acceptable. Urkund will be used to report on potential plagiarism. Find out more about how to reference properly and avoid plagiarism at
http://our.murdoch.edu.au/Student-life/Study-successfully/Referencing-and-citing/
The overall distribution of marks will be:
- Introduction (5 marks)
- Criteria (20 marks)
- Relative importance of criteria (15 marks)
- Modelling packages (15 marks)
- Evaluation (20 marks)
- Recommendation (15 marks)
- Report structure and presentation (10 marks)
