Week 3

*sigh* I don’t know what’s wrong with me today. This morning my brain felt like it’s been overworked. It felt so full and was just plain exhausted! And it’s only Monday morning!! And at times like that, I know the only thing I can do is just listen to some good music, stare out into nothingness and think of nothing; clear my mind a bit.

So, sad to say, I wasn’t as focused on today’s lecture as I normally would be.. zoned out a few times.. Nevertheless I did pay enough attention to note that we started off the lecture with a brief recap of last week’s topic , followed by the remaining slides from Week 2 which we hadn’t manage to cover regarding Project Initiation and the Project Planning Phase. The second half of the lecture covered this week’s lecture titled ‘Requirements Gathering’ which focuses on the second stage of the SDLC (the Analysis Phase).

Oooh! And to those who missed today’s lecture, you missed out on Mr Yeap’s famous question! He was talking about the importance of understanding business standards, policies and procedures and was using Dell as an example: “Dell has a policy that guarantees the arrival of customer orders within a specific number of days. Do you know how many days?” Anyone? ;) This is a question I’ve heard three semesters in a row so the answer is practically imbedded in me.. Answer: “4 days” :)

Unfortunately the last few slides were slightly rushed because we had run out of time (time sure flies..) But then again we started the lecture a little late because the class before us had also finished late.

Tutorial!
We watched the Malcolm Gladwell podcast. There was a slight problem with the speakers which, as Mr Ramesh suggested, we could conveniently leave out of our reflective blogs :D Jokes aside, Gladwell’s presentation, while perhaps just a liiiiiiiiiiiiitle lengthy, was also fairly interesting. His analysis on human behaviour and perception reminded me that being a systems analyst is more than just understanding the problems and business procedures at hand. It also requires a certain amount of skills in psychology to aid understanding of why people do what they do. This helps us understand why business processes are conducted the way they currently are and whether they can be improved.

Next week, we’re told that we will practicing our skills in information gathering and will therefore need to come up with a set of questions to ask our tutor. We have yet to come up with perfect questions and therefore plan to meet up sometime this week to discuss this further. Looking forwards to it guys!