Systems Analysis- Cheat Sheet PDF

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Systems Analysis Definition : The process of understanding and specifying in detail what the information system should accomplish Begins once a development project has been approved. It is about developing systems that solve an needs, which is achieved through a series of processes. Systems Design D...

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Systems Analysis Definition : The process of understanding and specifying in detail what the information system should accomplish Begins once a development project has been approved. It is about developing systems that solve an organisation’s needs, which is achieved through a series of processes. Systems Design Definition: The process of specifying in detail how the many components of the information system should be physically implemented. Systems Analyst Definition: A business professional who uses analysis and design techniques to solve business problems by using information technology. IT professional who specialises in analysing and designing information systems. Bridge between business and IT professional. Researches problems. Plans solution. Recommends solutions. Examines the business problem to be solved with an information system (may be new or enhanced system). Gathers information to determine system requirements. Delivers a set of system requirements. Analyst as a Business Problem Solver Customers want to order products at any time of the day or night: problem is how to process those orders around the clock without adding to the selling cost. Production needs to plan very carefully the amount of each type of product to produce each week: problem is how to estimate dozens of parameters that affect production and then allow planners to explore different scenarios before committing to a specific plan. Supplier want to minimise their inventory holding costs by shipping parts used in the manufacturing process in smaller batches: problem is how to order in smaller lots and accept daily shipments to take advantage of supplier discounts. Marketing wants to better anticipate customer needs by tracking purchasing patterns and buyer trends. problem is how to collect and analyse information on customer behaviour that marketing can put to use. Management continually wants to know the current financial picture of the company, including profit and loss, cash flow, and stock market forecasts. problem is how to collect, analyse, and present all the financial information management wants. Employees demand more flexibility in their benefits programs, & management wants to build loyalty & morale. problem is how to process transactions for flexible health plans, wellness programs, employee investment options, retirement accounts, and other benefit programs offered to employees. Analysts Approach to Problem Solving Research and understand the problem. Verify that the benefits of solving the problem outweigh the costs. Define the requirements for solving the problem. Develop a set of possible solution (alternatives are explored). Decide which solution is best and make a recommendation. Define the details of the chosen solution. Implement the solution. Monitor to make sure that you obtain the desired results Systems that SOLVES Business Problems System: a collection of interrelated components that function together to achieve some outcome Information system: a collection of interrelated components that collect, process, store, and provide as output the information needed to complete the business tasks. Subsystem: a system that is part of a larger system Functional decomposition: dividing a system into components based on subsystems that are further divided into smaller subsystems. System boundary: the separation between a system and its environments that inputs and outputs must cross. Automation boundary: the separation between the automated part of a system and the manual part of a system. Types of Information Systems Customer relationship Management (CRM) system: system that supports marketing, sales, and service operations involving direct and indirect customer interaction. Supply chain Management (SCM) system: system that seamlessly integrates product development, product acquisition, manufacturing, and inventory management. Accounting and financial management (AFM) system: system that records accounting information needed to product financial statements and other reports used by investors and creditors. Human resource management (HRM) system: system that support employeerelated tasks as payroll, benefits, hiring, and training. Manufacturing management (MM) system: system that controls internal product processes that turn raw materials into finished goods. Knowledge management system (KMS): system that supports storage and access to documents from all over organisation Collaboration support system (CSS): system that enables geographically distributed personnel to collaborate on projects/tasks. Business intelligence system: system that supports strategic planning and executive decision making. Enterprise resource planning (ERP): a process in which an organisation commits to using an integrated set of software packages for key information system.

Required Skills of the Systems Analysts Technical knowledge  Technical skills Technical skills are important because The scope, breadth, and depth of technology employed in medium- and large-scale organizations are vast. A company’s “simple” online order-processing application might involve a system with thousands of users spread over hundreds of locations. Such as system is crucial and expensive part of an organisation and thus, a systems analyst must have technical knowledge of the system as well as the following skills: • Computers and how they work • File, database, and storage hardware and software • Input and output hardware and software • Computer networks and protocols • Programming languages, operating systems, and utilities • Communication and collaboration technology such as digital telephones, videoconferencing, and Web-based document management systems Business knowledge  Business skills Systems analyst require business knowledge/skills because they are trying to solve a problem business after all. Analysts also need to understand the type of organisation they are working for because the more he/she knows the more effective their solutions can be. The analyst needs to know: What business functions do organizations perform? • How are organizations structured? • How are organizations managed? • What type of work goes on in organizations (finance, manufacturing, marketing, customer service, etc)? • What the specific organization does • What makes it successful • What its strategies and plans are • What its traditions and values are People knowledge  People skills Interpersonal skills are perhaps the analyst’s most important skills because analysts rely on others, including managers, users, programmers, technical specialists, customers, and vendors, to take a system from initial idea to final implementation. The analyst must be an effective teacher, mentor, confidant, collaborator, manager, and leader, shifting easily among those roles many times over the course of a typical workday. the analyst must effectively interact with people of diverse backgrounds, customs, and beliefs. ALSO NEEDS Tools and Techniques: Tools: software application that assists developers in creating models or other components required for a project. Techniques: strategies for completing specific system development activities - Project Planning techniques - Cost/Benefits analysis techniques - Interviewing techniques - Requirement modelling techniques - Architectural design techniques - Network configurating techniques - Database design Techniques IMPORTANCE OF BEING ETHICAL A systems analyst is asked to look into problems that involve information from many different parts of an organization. Especially if it involves individual employees, the information might be private, such as salary, health, and job performance. The analyst must have the integrity to keep this information private. The problems the analyst works on can also involve confidential corporate information, including proprietary information about products or planned products, strategic plans or tactics, and even top-secret information involving government military contracts. Sometimes, a company’s security processes or specific security systems can be involved in the analyst’s work. Analysts are expected to uphold the highest ethical standards when it comes to private proprietary information whether the analysts are employees or outside consultants. The analyst must also balance organizational privacy needs and the reluctance of some project participants to provide complete information with the improved outcomes that arise from the free exchange of information and ideas. It is a difficult balance to strike but one that is critical to project success. An analyst must take honest stock of his or her strengths, weaknesses, and performance as well as ask for needed help and resources and be ready to provide the same to others

Core processes of Systems Analysis: Identify the problem and obtain approval. Plan and monitor the project. Discover and understand details. Design system components. Build, test, and integrate system components. Complete systems test, and deploy the solution. Activities of Systems Analysis (part of Discover and understand details)

Why complete the system activities? By completing the system activities, the analyst defines in great detail what the information system needs to accomplish to provide the organisation with the desired benefits.

Activities include: 1. Gather detailed information: Systems analysts obtain information from people who will be using the system, through a variety of methods: Interviews. Questionnaires. Documents. Observing business processes. Research vendors. Comments and Suggestions. Study existing systems. Analyst must become experts in their organisation’s main business. 2. Define Requirements Analyst uses info gathered from users and documents to define requirements for the new system. System Requirements include the functions the system must perform and such related issues as user- interface formats and requirements for reliability, performance and security. Defining requirements is not just a matter of writing down facts and figures. Instead, the analyst creates models to record requirements, reviews the models with users and others, and refines and expands the models to reflect new or updated information.

3. Prioritise Requirements Once the system requirements are well understood, analyst establishes which requirements are most crucial for the system as sometime users and analyst need to ask themselves which functions are truly important and which are fairly important but not essential. Why PRIORTISE functions request by users? Because resources are always limited and, the analyst must always be prepared to justify the scope of the system. Thus, it is important that they know what is absolutely required. Unless the analyst carefully evaluates priorities, system requirements tend to expand as users make more suggestions (a phenomenon called scope creep). 4. Develop User-Interface Dialogs Users tend to be uncertain of many aspects of system requirements. Such requirements models as use cases, activity diagrams, and interaction diagrams can be developed based on user input, but it is often difficult for users to interpret and validate such abstract models. user validation of a user interface is much simpler and more reliable because the user can see and feel the system. To most users, the user interface is all that matters. Thus, developing user interface dialogs is a powerful method of eliciting and documenting requirements. Analysts can develop user-interfaces through: storyboard, abstract models such as interaction diagrams and written dialogs or user-interface prototypes. 5. Evaluate Requirement with Users Analysts use an iterative process, in which they elicit a user input to model requirements, return to the user for additional input or validation and then work alone to incorporate the new input and refine the models. To test user input, prototypes of user interfaces may be developed to prove that the chosen technologies will do what they are supposed to do. If the system will include a new innovative technology, the users may find it difficult to visualise exactly what the possibilities are, in this case prototypes fill in the gap. Functional VS non-functional Requirements System Requirements: All the activities the new system must perform or support and the constraints that the new system must meet. Functional Requirements: activities that the system must perform. For example, developing a payroll system must include “generate electronic funds transfer”, “calculate payroll taxes”. Non-Functional Requirements: are characteristics of the system other than those activities it must perform or support. It is not always easy to distinguish between functional and non-functional, so one way to identify and classify requirements is using FURPS. Stands for Functional (already covered) Usability Requirements: describes operational characteristics related to user, such as the user interface, related work procedures and documentation. E.g., user interface for an app should behave similarly to other apps when responding to gestures. Reliability: describes the dependability of a system. What is the failure rate? How often does the system exhibit behaviours such as service outages and incorrect processing and how it detects and recovers from those problems. Performance: the requirements that describe operational characteristics related to measures of workload, such as throughout and response time. E.g., a system much have a 0.5 second response time on button presses. Security: The requirements that describe how access to the application will be controlled and how data will be protected during storage and transmission. This includes, setting up access controls and encryption. FURPS+: an extension of FURPS that includes design constrains as well as implementation, system interface, physical and supportability requirements. Design constraints: describes restrictions to which the hardware and software must adhere to. E.g., a phone application might be required to use a certain operating system or consume only a certain Megabyte of flash memory storage.

Implementation requirements: describes constraints such as required programming languages and tools, documentation method, level of detail, and communication protocol for distributed components. Interface requirements: describes interactions among systems and data interchange formats. For example, a financial reporting system for a publicly traded company in the United States must generate data for the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in a specific XML format

Physical requirements : describes such characteristics of hardware as size, weight, power consumption, and operating conditions. For example, a system that supports battlefield communications might have such requirements as weighing less than 200 grams, being no larger than 5 cm cubed, and operating for 48 hours on a fully charged 1200-milliwatt lithium ion battery.

Support: describes how a system is installed, configured, monitored and updated. For example, requirements for a game

installed on a home PC might include automatic configuration to maximize performance on existing hardware, error reporting, and download of updates from a support server.

Themes for Information-Gathering Stakeholders and contribution to requirements definition: Questions Theme Questions to users Stakeholders are people who have an What do you do? are the internet in the successful implementation What business of the system. They are the primary operations and source of information for system processes requirements thus all stakeholders are How do you do it? How should those What steps do you operations be identified before “gathering detailed follow? How could performed? information” activity. Can be a small they be done group, or large diverse group. differently To identify stakeholders consider two What information What information dimensions by which they vary: is needed to do you use? What perform those inputs do you use? Internal: persons within the organisation operations? What outputs do who interact with the system or have a you produce? significant internet in its operation or These are the types of questions that an success. analyst might ask to gather information. external: persons outside Interview; BEST APPLIED: Interviews are the organization’s control and influence time-consuming tasks that provide a lot of who interact with the system or have a detail but the analyst must be sure that significant interest in its operation or the details he is obtaining are going to be success relevant and useful. As a result, interview operational: persons who regularly is compatible for small groups of interact with a system in the course of stakeholders that are within one location their jobs or lives. because the analyst might need to do a Executive: persons who don’t interact follow up the interview. directly with the system but who either 2. Distribute and Collect Questionnaires use information produced by the system Questionnaires are useful in gathering or have a significant financial or other information form key organisation interest in its operation and success. members about: Attitude, Beliefs, -------------------------------------------------------Behaviours. Characteristics. Provide Stakeholder Aspect of Interest preliminary insight into stakeholders. After stakeholder identification we Helps determine areas needing further consider what aspect of the system are of research using other methods. particular interest to each stakeholder and WHEN USE QUESTIONNAIRES: when why? This is expressed using user story: organisation members are widely “As a , I want to so dispersed. Many members are involved that .” For example, with the project. Exploratory work is “As an IT Staff, I want to ensure that the needed. Problem solving is required prior new system is optimised so that the user to interviews. can maximise system availability.” Question Types and Language: WHY is identifying stakeholders Closed-ended important? Including stakeholders in • Determine quantitative information – analysis activities is important because the Opinion information they posses may not be • Respondents are asked whether they obvious or widely known within the agree or disagree with the statement organisation. In addition, system Open-ended / explanation requirements imposed by executive, external stakeholder often have significant legal and financial implications. -------------------------------------------------------Information-Gathering Techniques There are many ways to gather

3. Review Inputs, Outputs, and Procedures Two sources of information about inputs, outputs and procedures One source is to obtain information is external to the organization •Industry-wide professional organisations and other companies. • May not be easy to obtain information from other companies Second source includes existing business documents and procedure descriptions within the organisation. Reviewing Internal documents and procedures serve two purposes. First, it is a good way to get a preliminary understanding of the Question types: processes Second, existing inputs, outputs, open-ended: allows interviewees to and documents can serve as visual aids for respond how they wish, and to what the interview length they wish. Are appropriate when 4. Observe and Document Business the analyst is interested in breadth and Process depth of reply. Firsthand experience is invaluable to Advantages: Encourages discussion and understand exactly what occurs within explanation. Reveals avenues of future business processes. More than any other questioning that may have gone untapped. activity, observing a business process in Provides richness of detail. Useful if the action will help you understand the interviewer is unprepared. business functions. You can observe by a Disadvantages: may result in too much irrelevant detail. May take too much time quick walk-through of an office or plant. Spending time with users at their jobs for the amount of useful information helps you understand the details of using gained. the computer system and carrying out Closed-Ended: Limit the number of business functions. A quick walk-through possible responses. Are appropriate for may be sufficient for one process, g...