Work-Related Project Analysis Part 2
BSA/376
October 15, 2012
Andrew Nash, MBA

Introduction to Elements of System Design
Managing a live project past the planning stage is a stressful and complex process. It takes a very special person to do this kind of job and even though it is stressful, that special person thrives in this kind of work and are very good at managing it. For a successful project management, there are four areas that must be controlled and they are: 1. Assigning tasks to team members after organizing each individual into a team. 2. Closely monitoring and controlling the progress of the project. 3. Communication monitoring for the project. 4. Keeping track of all the open activities in the lifetime of the project.
Systems design is the structuring the components and organizing the process of the system so that the new system can be programmed. The components are composed of the network, software, application architecture, system interfaces, user interfaces, the system appthat were built during the analysis. The outputs are the models or diagrams that describes the architecture of the system and detailed logic within the various components of the programming.

Traditional Approach to Design
The traditional approach to systems design is the data flow diagram which is enhanced by the addition of system boundary in which the designer sketches the system boundary to show the overall system. A structured design includes a system flowchart which show the movement of data among programs, manual processing steps, and files providing an overall view of the entire system. System flowcharts describes the interaction between layers of a multilayered system.
Module pseudocode describes the internal logic of a structure chart module as illustrated below.

Object Oriented Design System design is the bridge that puts business requirements in terms that the programmers can use to write the software that becomes the solution system. The first step in configuring the system is the architectural design and its purpose is to determine the configuration and structure of its various components. The two types of diagrams are the deployment diagrams and component diagrams. Component diagrams shows the various executable components and how they relate to each other while the deployment diagrams show where the components are executed on t computing platforms and together, they both define the configuration of the system. Once the architectural design is known, the detailed design can begin in which its objective is to determine the objects and methods within individual classes to support the use cases in which the process is divided into two major areas such as developing a design class diagram or DCD and developing the set of interacting classes and their methods via a sequence diagram.

Object Oriented Design Designing Databases Modern information systems store data in a database and access and manage the data using a DBMS Relational databases which are commonly used today. Developing a relational or object database is one of the key systems design. An object database stores data as a collection of related objects while a relational database is a collection of data stored in tables. Each object is assigned a unique object identifier and relationships among objects are represented by storing the object identifier of an object within related objects.

Components of a database management system and their interaction with application programs, users, and database administrators Designing the user interface Inputs and outputs are classified as user interfaces or system interfaces. Interaction between the user and the computer is also called as human computer interaction (HCI). The user interface is everything the user comes into contact while using the computer such as conceptually, perceptually, and physically. The user must have the knowledge which is called the user’s model which includes information about objects and functions available in the system in which the analyst worked hard to uncover during the analysis of the system. Human computer interaction as a field of research grew out of human factors engineering research that studies human interaction with machines in general. User interface are described as desktop metaphor, dialog metaphor, and document metaphor. The dialog metaphor emphasizes the interaction between user and computer, and interface design is called dialog design. Schneiderman’s eight golden rules are to strive for consistency, provide shortcuts, offer informative feedback, design dialogs to yield closure, offer simple error handling, permit easy reversal of actions, support internal locus of control, and reduce short term memory load.