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Information requirements and fact-finding

A company may decide to go ahead with a project after considering the Feasibility Study. They will agree a date for the next stage in the project life cycle to begin, the ‘Systems Analysis’ stage. During this stage, the Systems Analyst will investigate the problem in much more detail than was done for the Feasibility Study. They must find out a number of things:

    • Find out in detail how the current system works and identify problems.
    • Identify what is required from the new system by all of the ‘stakeholders’.
    • Identify the data to be stored, the volume of data and the data about the data!
    • Identify the current hardware and software and any necessary upgrades required.
    • Identify all the data that will enter the system and all the data that will leave it.
    • Produce data flow diagrams that describe the flow of data around the system.
    • Produce written descriptions and diagrams that aid understanding.

Where does the Systems Analyst start? They need to use a range of information-gathering techniques to collect the information that allows them to do the above. There are six fact-finding methods that could be used. These are:

One-to-one interviews
A well-planned interview will involve:

    • preparing questions
    • making an appointment
    • giving the person you are interviewing the questions in advance
    • carrying out the interview, ideally recording it if possible
    • writing up the interview for the appendix of the Systems Analyst's report
    • clarifying with the interviewee any points the interviewer is not sure about, then updating the write-up
    • summarising the interview's findings for the body of the Systems Analyst's report
    • thanking the interviewee.

Interviews should ideally be held with the managers first, to get an overview of a system, followed by interviews with the users of a system, to find out the day-to-day operational problems. During interviews, the Systems Analyst can start getting a feel for what people want from any new system, what problems they want solving, what reports they want generating and so on.

Interviews can be quite time-consuming to organise, especially if you need to do more than a few. They are important to do, however, because details of the way things are currently done can quickly be ascertained.

Group interviews
We have already said that doing lots of one-to-one interviews can be time-consuming. A compromise would be to hold a group interview. This could be done with the employees from a department, for example. They could all be called together and operations, problems and methods could be discussed. The Systems Analyst needs to understand that for many workers, introducing a new computerised system equates to redundancies and they will need to show skill in finding out what they need to know without upsetting anyone! While group interviews can save time, there is a danger that one or two people will dominate these events and that some people's views will be drowned out.

Collecting documents
An excellent way of finding out about the data used in any existing system and the way a company currently does things is to collect examples of documents that are used. These will show the names of data items, give examples of the items themselves and will prompt the Systems Analyst to ask employees questions about the data. For example:

    • Where did the data originate?
    • How is the data constructed?
    • Are there any synonyms used for any data items - different names for the same piece of data? For example, most people would call a car a ‘car’ but some might use the words ‘auto or ‘automobile’. You would, however, only want to set up one field for car, not three! Are there any instances where different names are used to describe the same piece of data in the system being investigated?
    • What is the range of allowable values?
    • What actually happens to the data on a document?
    • Who uses the data?
    • When is the data removed from a system and who does it?

Observations
Sometimes, what people say they do is different to what actually happens in practice. Sometimes, people simply don't mention things in an interview because they either forget or it seems too trivial to mention. A Systems Analyst can sometimes find out information by spending time watching people go about their job. People can be very aware of the presence of someone that they know is watching what they are doing and behave differently, although with skill and time, this problem can be overcome.

Questionnaires
Questionnaires can be used to collect very focused answers to questions from a large number of people relatively quickly and without using up a lot of manpower (compared to interviews, for example). It is common to ask people to complete questionnaires on a computer or online. The results can then be automatically analysed by software, choices summarised in tables and graphs used to provide a way of summarising large amounts of data in a form that can be easily understood. However,

    • writing good, clear questions that mean the same to everyone in a questionnaire can be difficult, even for 'closed' questions (questions which require a short answer or to pick one from a selection e.g. 'Do you like school?' is an example as there are two answers 'Yes' and 'No' (and perhaps 'Sometimes'). An open question might be 'Why do you like school?')
    • asking 'open' questions (see the example above, but open questions are ones that start with e.g. "why" or "explain" and require people to talk about reasons) and summarising replies is hard to do
    • if someone doesn't understand a question, there may be no opportunity to get help
    • most people do not return them.

An improvement, if resources are available, is to have someone 'interview' people using a questionnaire. The person interviewing asks the questions on the questionnaire and records the answers. If the person doesn't understand a question, it can be explained to them. More questionnaires will be completed this way.

Letters, email and phone
Phone calls can be useful because you can actually speak to the person you need to without having to spend time travelling to see them. Email is immediate compared to letters but whilst everyone can be sent a letter, not everyone has an email address. Even if someone has an email address, they may not use it and you may not realise they don’t! Letters are more time-consuming to prepare and write compared to email, which tend to be written in a quick, matter-of-fact way. Both emails and letters give you answers in writing compared to phone calls, where you are relying on your ability to take good notes and understand what someone is telling you. Emails and the phone, and to a lesser degree letters, are especially useful to quickly clarify points made during an interview.

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