MIS 730 Workbook for HW#1 Design poster on Personal Information Systems
Problem Space and Solution Space of your PIS Poster – Your guide to creating the poster
As was mentioned in my lecture, following the process of getting to the finished poster is the focus of all poster designs. If you focus on the journey to get there, you will not only enjoy and learn more of the design techniques but will be more consistent in producing interesting and impactful design results.
Since the design process that we will be following will take a few iterations before you finalize your posters, here is where you should spend your time and effort in each of the iterations. First you should focus on understanding the problem space, understanding particularly the larger system in which the system you are asked to design is to serve. Unless you know what the larger system is looking to achieve as well as challenges the larger system is experiencing, you will most likely miss the mark in designing an effective system to meet the needs of the larger system.
With that said, you will use the Ackoff 3-step process to draw out, from the outside in, exploring your work/school and personal life, your goals and objectives, the stakeholders, individuals and or parties that you interact with to meet those goals and objectives. In this process of exploring and discovering different aspects of your lives, you will most likely be looking at the things that you do, i.e. the activities that you engage in, the people/entities that you interact with. By using the activities as the focal point, you will uncover and learn about the things that you do or not do in achieving your goals and objectives.
Remember Ackoff “3-step process” and comparison of synthesis vs analysis:
In order to better understand the “containing system” – your school/work and personal life (step 2), you would have to play out individual examples (set of activities) of information flow, decision made and interactions, as you carry out your work/school and personal life. The key is that the focus is on activities you engage in and the interactions you have with entities and people.
EXERCISE – First, for each key STAKEHOLDERs (including yourself) that will have different degrees of influence on you achieving your goals and objective, list them out and try to write next to them their goals and objectives. This is an important exercise as it would help you to understand their priorities comparing to yours. List your key stakeholders here (don’t forget yourself) and their goals and objectives as best you can.
Solution:
MYSELF
-To complete my master’s with lot of knowledge in information field.
-To get internship as business analyst in top MNC.
-To learn professional baking , cooking and do adventure sports.
-To send my parents in all possible countries for vacation.
-To start my own bakery and hotel.
-To maintain my health.
FAMILY
-To see me successful in every possible way.
-To see me a helping others and willingly flow my tradition and culture.
FRIENDS
-To see me getting my desired job.
-To see me spending time with them.
PROFESSOR
-Teach me well so I can gain knowledge about the subject.
-Manage every students records in class.
-To see there students successful in career.
When you look closely at the activities you are doing now, you will learn that you make certain decisions and or do certain things in a particular sequence or with selected set of people/entities. That is your choice (whether intentional or not) in getting things done. All these activities are being performed subjected to how well the people/entities are interacting with you and any environmental factors that may complicate your ability to successfully carry out these activities.
At this point of your problem inquiry, you should use scenario narratives to quickly describe the sequence of things you do, focus on any difficulty/challenges, whether the activity completed successfully or not, be as specific as possible. Taking note of whether these activities accomplished your goals and objectives. Use different scenarios to bring out different aspects of your life that are problematic and or preventing you from achieving your goals and objectives.
EXERCISE – With that as the introduction, let us consider what happened in the early morning. Try and capture the things that you do during the day as a sequence of activities noting along the way, the entities/people you interact with, things that you accomplished or NOT, the challenges/frustrations in dealing with problems and at the end of that series of activities, try to connect these activities with your goals and objectives.
I generally wake up early morning after getting fresh and with my bath. I call my parents while making my breakfast I try to make variation in my all meals so that help me to learn more about cooking.
Once I am ready with breakfast I eat it with my friends.Then I prepare my lunch and pack it head towards school.
Once I reach school I spend few hours in library doing my assignment and reading work given by my professor.
Then I proceed to gym and after that I have my lunch.Thereafter I rest for sometime and try to entertain me with my interest thing.
Thereafter, I go to library and continue with my assignment & go through my all lecture study material and take my evening class and try to participate in class.
After class I go home me and my friend cook dinner together and have it while discussing our day with each other.
Then I try to learn something in new for day and go through slides done in class.
As you dive into each of these activities, you will take note of constraints and or challenges in carrying out these activities.
EXERCISE – Jot down the constraints and or challenges that you experience while carrying out your activities. Come back to this to capture the challenges throughout the inquiry of your school/work and personal life.
Constraints & Challenges in School life
-Need to do the planning for the imperative work and task as there are opportunities to skip some because of broad weight and close due dates.
-To keep up a decent life adjust.
-Play out to take part in class with full vitality and excitement.
Constraints & Challenges in personal life
-Enhance speaking with individuals and socializing with surrounding people as I think I ailing in it.
-To enhance my day by day way of life and attempt to make different kind of meals all the more frequently Generally I didn’t get time.
-To organize all my task so I can meet the due date and take every necessary step before the due date.
-To take an interest more in outside activities like boxing, doing adventure sports and so forth.
The scenario narratives (bottom up inquiry) help you focus on the activities (things that you do and entities/people you interact with) that you engage in day to day to achieve some objective or simply to get something done. There are two things that you want to use this set of scenarios to help you construct and understand the problems/challenges that you are experiencing now.
From the set of activities, in this case the scenario narratives, that you had created, can you identify a common theme or pattern that you learned occurring repeatedly? In other words, can you find any trends and or patterns among the problems/challenges that you learned from the set of scenarios?
You have done the bottom up inquiry, it is now time to take a step back and do the corresponding topdown inquiry to spot repeated or systemic occurrence of your system (your work/school and personal life). If you could identify such pattern/common problem, you might be able to design a contained system (PIS) to help with your work/school and personal life.
Use the set of scenarios to help you learn about the STRUCTURE and PROCESS of the containing system – your work/school and personal life. Presumably, in constructing the set of scenarios, you had captured the most notable/problematic situations that you are experiencing right now.
The most effective means to show the STRUCTURE and the PROCESS of your current system is to use illustrations to help highlight the problems and challenges you encounter in carrying out your work/school and personal life. Use simple lines, circles and boxes to represent how entities are structured and how they are related to each other. Lines connecting boxes could be used to show the relationships with each other or their interactions. You can also use flowcharts and or sequence diagrams to help illustrate the sequence of activities and the decision points that have to be chosen in order to achieve your goals and objectives. Such illustrations of PROCESS and STRUCTURE enable you to focus on the entities and interactions among the entities involved (the STRUCTURE) and the decisions with associated activities (the PROCESS) to help you identify opportunity for designing a system to help with those challenges.
As you look closely to the set of scenario narratives that you have captured, here is one way you can take to learn more about what might be going on…
From the set of scenario narratives, identify the set of actors/entities in your life (school/work and personal). This can be people, machines, or objects. For sure, one of the entities is yourself. Other folks will include family members, friends, colleagues, etc. Then trace or follow the interactions among these entities and note the nature of the interactions/exchanges. You are looking for frequency of interactions, what get exchanged, the resources needed to facilitate such interactions, and the mechanisms used to enable such communications. As you follow these interactions, which I call them activities/scenarios as at the end of that sequence of interactions, these activities are initiated with some goals/objectives in mind to accomplish something. I suggest starting with a day in a life of how you spend the day, weekend noting those interactions. This is your bottom up exercise of tracing connections/interactions, figuring out the structure of your current system, the processes that are in place to support your work/school and personal life. Presumably, at the end of this exercise you will have traced out many series of interactions, and then begin to categorize them base on commonality/patterns that you may have identified.
While you are doing this, you will notice problems and challenges – i.e. you are constantly “fighting fires”, interrupted, doing someone else’s job, etc. Or that you find yourself spending way too much time in front of the TV or working on your Facebook page. Whatever that may be that you discovered, they are all important to note. Now that you have all these activities to account for how you spend the day and week doing, do they all contribute toward your goals and objectives? Some types/categories of activities are more important to you than others, you may also find problems with how these activities have a life of its own, keep repeating and consuming more and more resources.
Whatever you may have gained insights into your life activities, you may be asking yourself what are the real goals/objectives in your life both short-term and long term, and whether any of those things that you are doing are helping you achieve those goals. If not, is that because you are engaging in the wrong set of activities or that the whole system of activities and the structure that provided support to these activities may be “broken”. You probably will ask yourself, that you have these goals and objectives to meet (ex. stay healthy, invest in retirement, more time playing than working, get your Steven MSIS degree this year, etc.), do you need to change what you are doing? Do you have the right set of entities in your system, the right process to help achieve them, the resources needed to help accomplish them, etc.
EXERCISE – Using all or selected set of scenario narratives, draw or sketch out the STRUCTURE of your school/work and personal life. Not everything is important. Do the same for the PROCESS. What are your key decision process that drive the set of activities you do to accomplish your goals and objectives. Draw them here…
STRUCTURE
Professor
Family
Friends
Myself
PROCESS
Stay
Fit
Find time to do outdoor activities
Spend time in gym
Try to eat healthy
Create good network
Search various portal for jobs opening
Apply for job on all portals
Get Internship
Difficult to wake early morning
Sometime Skip my breakfast
Time Administration
Late submission of assignment and miss reading
Such exploration will enable you to map out pattern of interactions among objects/people as well as the decisions and decision criteria used that change the path and outcome of these activities. From the set of activities you have played out, over time, you will build up an abstract way of thinking about such interactions. Once you have the abstraction (found the common pattern), work back down to the detailed level (the activities). That is, start from detail interactions, move up to abstraction, and then back down to the details. (zooming in and out – through abstraction, developing conceptual model of what is going on) This exercise will enable you to create the STRUCTURE and the PROCESS of the containing system.
Once you have an abstraction (pattern of interactions and recurring problems encountered), you will notice different things. But if you start with an abstraction without having worked up from details, you might miss important things. For example, if my abstraction of an information system, inherited from past teaching, is that an information system is a computer, then I will miss many interesting interactions in my day, and probably settle on buying a PDA, instead of thinking through what structures, processes and functions I really need to manage my life.
The way to do design generally involves two kinds of thinking – top down vs bottom up (Synthetical vs Analytical Thinking). You will practice both kinds of inquiry simultaneously to help you better understand the larger system and to also help you figure out HOW your current PIS (if you have one) is helping/or not helping you handle your work/school and personal life.
At this point you would have learned a lot about your work/school and personal life, activities that you do, what you look to accomplish, problems and challenges. Problem space of your poster will have illustrations, sketches and many different scenarios to show just what you have learned. Hence, it should effectively communicate the essence of your current state of affairs as it relates to work/school and personal life – we call the space, the Problem Space.
As you begin to look into the solutions to address the problems you had encountered, it is very important to bear in mind that, there may indeed be things that you would change in your work/school and personal life – i.e. the larger system. The design assignment calls for you to design a Personal Information System (the contained system) that would help you conduct both aspects of your life. When you begin to look at design alternatives for your PIS, think in terms of the behavior (function) you would like your PIS to have, it would then lead you to think about the STRUCTURE and PROCESS this system should have in order to produce these FUNCTIONs. Different choices of structure and process could be designed to produce the same functions. It is these different combinations of structure and process that produce different design alternatives.
When you start to sketch and draw out different structures and processes, you are constructing the solution space of your poster. Solution Space is about the design alternatives as well as the solution scenarios you will construct to show how any of the design alternatives works to help you handle both your work/school and personal life.
Before you leave the Problem Space behind and start looking at different ideas with respect to addressing the underlying problem that you are experiencing with your school/work and personal life, you need to identify and define the problem you are trying to address. If you have done the job of capturing scenario narratives earlier in this workbook and have come to understand what might be the heart of the problem that created the problems and challenges that you have come to realized, that would be the problem you will focus on finding design alternatives.
EXERCISE – Describe the systemic/recurring problem that you had identified in your bottom up and topdown inquiry that you had determined to be the underlying problem responsible for the challenges that you had captured in your scenario narratives. In addition, choose a few key scenario narratives to demonstrate and support your problem description
TOP DOWN APPROACH
Wake up late as I missed my alarm many time so skip my breakfast as I want to reach school on time.
Skip my gym as I am busy with my assignments and reading work.
Waste my time on social media and chatting on my phone
Feel tired to attend my classes after full long day and cannot participate as I want to.
Got completely exhausted so dint able to do much of the activity
BOTTOM UP APPROACH
Stay
Fit
Find time to do outdoor activities
Spend time in gym
Try to eat healthy
Create good network
Search various portal for jobs opening
Apply for job on all portals
Get Internship
Difficult to wake early morning
Sometime Skip my breakfast
Time Administration
Late submission of assignment and miss reading
EXERCISE – Show your PROCESS and STRUCTURE illustrations in support of the problem description above. If the primary problem is the PROCESS, show how decisions are made and WHY you think is “broken” to have caused the problems. If the primary problem is the STRUCTURE, show what contributed to the problem in terms of the way entities are organized, connected or not, how information are exchange or not, etc. If both then show how both are contributing to the problem.
-Process as a Primary problem
On the off chance that we think about that the process as primary problem, at that point that way to defeat this we need to play out the comparable activities in a similar time allotment however we have a few requirements that we don’t know at the same time were we ready to finish those activities on time and will we get the agreeable outcome out of those.
Wake up early at 7 am
Get freshen up and take a bath
Make breakfast and talk to my parents
Pack my lunch and head towards school at 10am
Head towards gym 12:30 to 1:30pm and then eat lunch at 2pm
Entertain my self from 2 to 4pm
Continue with my assignment work and go through lecture from 4 to 6pm
Attend classes from 6:30 to 9pm and try to participate
Go home and cook my dinner and have it from 9 to 10:30
Try to learn something new and go through lectures and go to sleep by 11:30
Do my assignment and reading work from 10:30 to 12:30 am
Have breakfast and then make lunch
-Structure as a primary problem
In the event that we roll out huge improvement to the structure and assume that I would just focus on my master’s program commit more opportunity to it and try to wake early to make my day more productive. Also, other than sitting around idly engage myself I improve my schedule much.
Get freshen up and take a bath
Make breakfast and talk to my parents
Wake up early at 7 am
Pack my lunch and head towards school at 9:30am
Head towards gym 11 to 12pm and then eat lunch at 12:30pm
Entertain my self from 12:30 to 2:30 am
Continue with my assignment work and go through lecture from 2:30 to 6 pm
Attend classes from 6:30 to 9pm and try to participate
Go home and cook my dinner and have it from 9 to 10pm
Try to learn something new between 10 to 12am and go through lectures and go to sleep by 12
Have breakfast and then make lunch
Do my assignment and reading work from 9:30 to 11am
If you have done all the exercises, you would have created the narratives and the illustrations for the problem space illustrations for your poster. It is simply a matter of laying out all the elements on the poster page.
Creating your Solution Space
You had thus far looked at the scenario narratives collectively in an attempt to spot trends and patterns, looking for systemic behavior so as to help you identify the underlying problem that you are looking to address in the solution space. You now should look at the narratives from the perspective of what these activities are there to accomplish. You may have done that if you had explored if these set of activities that you do are indeed helping you meet your goals and objectives.
For example, you may have tasks/activities that have to be done for personal hygiene, taking care of a child, going to work, etc. They are planned activities where most often they are scheduled. And then there are activities on the list that were very much event driven coming at you as the day goes by. Some of these unexpected events may turn into scheduled tasks/activities that you would carry out in the future. These “to be done things” as many of us call them “To do list” has items on it that may have different characteristics in terms of the time, effort and resources that are required to complete them. They carry different priorities and most of all contribute at different level toward meeting your personal and professional goals/objectives. No matter how you model your personal and professional life, this understanding of the demand generated by you and demands coming at you throughout the day and weeks are key to how your PIS has to be designed in order to support and enable you to do all those things and meet your goals and objectives.
Whether the challenges you identified as resolving conflicts, priority, competing for resources, not getting the info or right info, no access to info, etc, etc, this is the right time to think about introducing the necessary FUNCTION(s) to help you address the problem you had identified so that the things that you do will be better aligned with your short and long term goals and objectives.
EXERCISE – At this point in your inquiry of the problem space and now looking for possible solution to address the problem, many ideas may already have been in your mind. Depending how far along these ideas have been brewing in your mind, it is time for you to describe what the solution idea(s) may be that you are looking to test how appropriate/effective these ideas may help in addressing the problem. This exercise is liken to the brainstorming process of generating as many ideas as you can think of as these ideas become the set of design alternatives that you will explore further. Write them down as you think of them. If you couldn’t think of anymore, move on. You can always come back and add more ideas.
-Try to do performing multiple tasks at whatever point it is conceivable.
I think performing various tasks is the way to do different things immediately. It will spare a considerable time and assets and a ton of endeavors would be spared.
-Try to organize the undertakings as indicated by seriousness and due date.
A very much important must be finished on time and all the unimportant activities must be wiped out.
-Eliminate all pointless activities.
Like I have understood that more often than not get squandered in pointless activities, so those activities can be killed, and that time would be used in more valuable task.
-Try to wake up early to complete more work.
This will help in doing some extra study work and spare time for the normal schedule during the day time to do other tasks of my interest.
-Make various meal in large quantity at whatever point conceivable. Attempt to make meal in large quantity in free time with the goal that it very well may be utilized for many days.
Adding and trimming the idea list is common – part of the process of evaluating alternatives among available ideas. Developing any of these ideas further sets the path for developing the functional behavior you want your PIS to have to help you address the problem you had identified. Remember in our first lecture, we speak of using the Structure, Process, Function and the environment to model any system (large or small, simple or complex). SPF/E enable us to form abstract representation of the real system to help us focus on the important aspects of the systems we are inquiring and subsequently looking to redesign them.
Most often, our thought process in looking for design solution may start with ideas and ideas develop into specific functional behavior which then further develop into the STRUCTURE and PROCESS that co-produce the functional behavior of the system.
EXERCISE – With each design alternatives (possible solutions that you would like to pursue) that you have listed and described above, illustrate HOW it would work from the STRUCTURE and PROCESS perspectives to then produce the FUNCTIONal behavior of this system. Have at least 2 alternatives illustrated here. Use any diagraming techniques you like.
SOLUTION 1
Go home and cook my dinner and have it from 9 to 10:30
Make breakfast and talk to my parents
Try to learn something new and go through lectures and go to sleep by 12
Head towards gym 11 to 12pm and then eat lunch at 12pm
Get freshen up and take a bath
Attend classes from 6:30 to 9pm and try to participate
Continue with my assignment work and go through lecture from 2 to 6 pm
Have breakfast and then make lunch
Do my assignment and reading work from 9 to 11 am
Entertain my self and take nap from 12:30pm to 2pm
Pack my lunch and head towards school at 9am
Wake up early at 6 am
SOLUTION 2
Make breakfast and lunch talk to my parents
Head towards gym 11:30 to 12:30pm and then eat lunch at 12:30pm
Get freshen up and take a bath
Pack my lunch and head towards school at 9am
Do my assignment and reading work from 9:30 to 11:30 am
Entertain my self and take nap from 12:30pm to1:30pm
Wake up early at 6 am
Work on my skills that will help me in my internship from 1:30 to 2:30pm
Have breakfast while goin school in bus
Try to learn something new and go through lectures and go to sleep by 12
Attend classes from 6:30 to 9pm and try to participate
Continue with my assignment work and go through lecture from 2:30 to 5pm
Do some outdoor activities from 5 to 6pm
Go home and cook my dinner and have it from 9 to 10pm
What entities you include in your STRUCTURE representation will depends on what is pertinent to include in order to illustrate how the structure of your solution contributed to the function of the system. The same applies to the PROCESS representation. What decision points and tasks should be included in the process will depend on how you see the process working with the structure to produce the function of the system.
You have used scenario narratives in the problem space to highlight the problems and challenges that you are experiencing right now. Scenario narratives can also be used to demonstrate how a design alternative works toward addressing the problem(s) that you had identified in the problem space.
EXERCISE – One effective way of showing how the new or redesign system work to address the problem is to use the same set of scenario narratives from the problem space and show how the outcome would be different when the new PIS is in place. Introducing a new system or redesigning the existing system is not only to address the problem identified but to enable new things that, you, as the beneficiary of the PIS, could do that would not have been possible. If that is the case, then a new set of scenario narratives needs to be created to show that aspect of the system.
Take the appropriate scenario narratives from the problem space and modify them to show how the behavior of the larger system (your school/work and personal life) is different. Additional scenario narratives if appropriate to show new things that you now could do.
Give more time to do Class Assignment and taking a shot at planning dinners and do outdoor activities.
On the off chance that these things can be added to the present Solution-1 then I would get more time for doing my class assignments and setting up my meals which I skip out more often than not other thing is I can dedicate some time for the outside activities which would assist me with being healthy.
I think the Solution-1 is sufficiently adaptable to include these activities as I have enough time in afternoon to part into numerous more things as I can take a shot at enhancing my skills and focus more on applying for internship and furthermore chip away at Assignments and Class. I can likewise build some more time after I before I go to sleep to do a some of the work.
EXERCISE – What is left to do in the solution space is to indicate which design alternative is the preferred choice and explain WHY one alternative works better compare to other alternatives.
I think solution 2 is better as I can commit more opportunity to accomplish more activities
-I will enhance my health by committing additional time.
-Breaking down the schedule in different time allotment will help me in assignments and apply for internship and enhancing my skills moreover.
-Increasing two hour by waking early and dozing late will help doing some additional work like doing a few school work or devoting more time to my health.
If you have done all the exercises, you would have produced the necessary content to populate the poster to display both the problem space and the solution space alongside each other. Turn in this workbook and the poster by the designated due date.