1 M253: TEAM WORKING IN DISTRIBUTED ENVIRONMENTS TUTOR MARKED ASSIGNMENT Cut-Off Date: 13 – Dec - 2015 Total Marks: 100 Marks Scored: What to submit Each page of each document you submit should be headed with the title of the TMA, your name and your perso

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M253: TEAM WORKING IN DISTRIBUTED ENVIRONMENTS
TUTOR MARKED ASSIGNMENT
Cut-Off Date: 13 – Dec - 2015
Total Marks: 100
Marks Scored:
What to submit
Each page of each document you submit should be headed with the title of the TMA, your name and your personal identifier, for example:
M253 TMA 1
Ahmad Hasan
04321
You should submit one zipped file which contains the following two files: One file should contain your individual response (Questions 1) and the second file should contain the team response (Questions, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6). The two files should be named TMA01-YourName-YourID-individual and TMA01-YourName-YourID-team respectively. Please number the pages in each file.
The zipped file should be in the following format:
M253‐TMA01‐Semester‐Year‐YourBranch‐YourID‐YourName
Plagiarism Warning:
As per AOU rules and regulations, all students are required to submit their own TMA work and avoid plagiarism. The AOU has implemented sophisticated techniques for plagiarism detection. You must provide all references in case you use and quote another person's work in your TMA. You will be penalized for any act of plagiarism as per the AOU's rules and regulations.
Declaration of No Plagiarism by Student (to be signed and submitted by student with TMA work):
I hereby declare that this submitted TMA work is a result of my own efforts and I have not plagiarized any other person's work. I have provided all references of information that I have used and quoted in my TMA work.
Name of Student:
Signature:
Date:
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SCENARIO
Imagine that you and the other members of your team are employed by a small firm of computer software consultants known as Open Solutions. Open Solutions offers a range of systems design and development services, although for larger projects it contracts out system development to others.
When developing a system in response to a successful proposal, teams are usually put together depending upon the skills needed by the project and employees’ availability.
An invitation to work on a system design project has been received from a Newspaper Delivery Agency (see below). This invitation was received at a very busy time for Open Solutions so the project team was assembled only on the basis of availability to work on the project, rather than the skills that might be required. Due to commitments to other projects that each of you will be working on, you will be unable to meet, regularly, face-to-face during the course of the project. Open Solutions has therefore decided that your team will work as a distributed team, communicating electronically.
Open Solutions sees distributed working as a way to be more flexible in creating project teams and hopes this will enable them to respond more effectively to new clients. Your employer has already been encouraging employees, as professional practitioners, to keep a reflective journal. They now wish to extend this idea to teams and to encourage team reflection at key stages of the project. They would like the team reflection to be used in creating reports to describe and evaluate the team working on this current project.
Newspaper Delivery Agency
Your team has been assigned to handle a new client called Newspaper Delivery Agency.
The newspaper delivery agency manages the delivery of newspapers and magazines in a small town. Currently all management, orders, and billing is being managed manually at the agency. Correspondence with the customers is also by telephone or through the delivery persons in each area, who take down orders, or any changes in delivery pattern and updates the news agents at the main office. This manual system has often lead to confusion and inconvenience for the customers.
The management of the agency has decided that it would be more efficient to have a computerized management and online ordering system in the agency; the system should provide the following functionalities:
 For each delivery person, the system must print, each day, the publications to be delivered to each address.
 The system should also print, for the newsagent, a summary of who received what publications each day.
 Once a month, bills are delivered to customers along with their newspapers. These bills should be computed automatically by the system.
 The system should be able to manage some simple geographic information so that it prints information for the delivery person in the order in which publications are
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 The system will also include a web interface for the clients, using which the clients can place orders, view all available publications, specify any changes in delivery pattern (e.g. holidays), as well as view their billing information.
 Inventory, stock and resource management
When designing the system it should be kept in mind that the system is intended for use by newsagents who are only casual users of computer systems. Therefore the system in the agency will have to be simple to use and robust, providing guidance at every stage of use and on-line help.
The newspaper delivery agency management approaches your employers to undertake an investigation of their current and future needs and identify possible ways of addressing these needs. Your employers have agreed to undertake this study in two stages, which will be advised to you in the Activity Sheet for each of the two milestones in this course, and are summarized in the Road Map.
END OF SCENARIO
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TEAM ACTIVITIES
This section comprises the set of activities that you need to complete, as individuals and as a team, in order to achieve the learning outcomes of the course, and to complete this tutor marked assignment.
ACTIVITY
DESCRIPTION
CUT-OFF DATE
1
A Forum has already been setup for your team in LMS. Post a short commentary describing yourself in the forum. Your introductory messages(s) should contain some of the following information:
 Contact Details
 Information about yourself
 Previous experience working as a part of a team
 Skills
End of week 1
2
Create a Project Log in which you record the activities that you engage in and your reactions to them, including your reactions to what other members of your team contribute. Try to answer the following questions I your log:
 What you hope to gain from undertaking this course?
 What skills do you think you will need in order to meet these learning outcomes?
 Do you already possess any of these skills, or do you feel that you will need to develop them during the course?
 Do you foresee any problems?
End of week 2
3
Each team member needs to post a website evaluation on the team forum. Each member should choose a different website for their individual investigation, and provide a short evaluation (not more than 300 words) of their chosen site for the rest of the team. Some criteria that you could use in your evaluation are:
1- structure
2- navigation
3- presentation of text and images
4- visual layout
5- Use of media.
After you have posted your own evaluation visit the chosen websites of your team members and think about their comments on those sites.
End of week 3
4
Put all the reviewed websites in a rank order, from what you think is the best site to what you think is the worst site, and give a very brief justification for your ordering.
Combine the individual opinions of the team members into a single list, which represents the collective view of the whole team on the rank ordering of all the sites that you have evaluated.
End of week 4
5
Read the Scenario (above) to acquaint yourself with the application area that we have chosen as a focus for your activities during the rest of this course.
End of week 5
6
Read some relevant information from whatever sources you choose – for example, E-Library, brochures and magazines, websites, opinions gathered from other people – that will provide you with raw material on which to base your subsequent analysis about the proposed system.
7
Make a list of all the people who you think could be regarded as stakeholders in the system, in the sense that they are likely to be involved in, or affected by, its development or use.
8
Look at lists compiled by the other team members and compare them with yours, in terms of both their contents and the order of the items that they contain.
End of week 6
9
As a team, come to a common agreement about, and justification of, what major subsystems you would include in the proposed system. From these you should
End of week 7
5
choose, as a team, the two most important subsystems from those that you have identified.
10
Make two groups in each team. Each group should analyze one of the two subsystems that have been identified. This will involve determining individually (in each group) which requirements of which stakeholder the nominated subsystem will address. Having made your individual lists of suggestions, you should then post your suggestions to the group members with whom you are cooperating on the subsystems allocated to your group, so that you can compare your lists and agree on a common list for the subsystem.
End of week 8
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All agreed lists should be made available to the whole team.
A final team document should be produced showing all the chosen subsystems and the way they will address the requirements of the stakeholders.
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As a team, you need to come to a common agreement about the contents of the web application that will be the proposed solution to the system identified in the scenario.
As a team, you need to decide the contents of the home page and the nature of the set of pages that will be directly accessible from it. We would expect you to identify at least four pages. It would be sensible to check that your proposed website design is consistent with the subsystems that you earlier identified as important for your various stakeholders.
The responsibility for determining what should be displayed on each page should be allocated to group in the team. Rearrange the members of the two groups so that each group should be with a different fellow member of the team. Each group will need to work on two pages.
End of week 9
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You should analyze each proposed page that has been allocated to you by the team. This will involve determining individually the content that you think it needs to display, and the way in which this content will be presented. You should note down the reasons for the items that you include on your allocated pages and the way they will be presented.
Having made your individual lists of suggestions, you should then post your suggestions to the group members with whom you are cooperating on each of the pages allocated to your group, so that you can compare your suggestions and agree on a common description of what should be displayed on each page and how it should be displayed.
All agreed page descriptions should then be made available to the whole team.
When all the page descriptions have been agreed and submitted to the team, they should be combined into a single document that presents the team’s conclusions about the nature and content of the top two layers/subsystems of your proposed website.
End of week 10
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Provide, for the benefit of your clients, a brief team report on the work you have undertaken and the conclusions you have reached about the various aspects of the system that you have investigated during this project.
End of week 11
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DELIVERABLES
This section comprises the questions that you need to answer as a team and individually as part of this tutor marked assignment.
You should have completed the activities set out in the ‘Team Activities’ section.
As a result of performing activities 1 – 11, you should be in a position to submit your responses to the questions mentioned below. You will be expected, as a team, to have produced responses to questions, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6. You will also be expected, as an individual, to have produced responses to question 1, having reflected on the processes that led to your team response.
QUESTIONS
SCOPE
MARKS QUESTION – 1
Explain in your own words about your individual experience which you have gained during the study of this course. Support your answer with evidence and relate it to your learning with appropriate examples.
a) How would you compare your contribution to the team by summarizing your involvement over the whole duration of course and identify actions or activities you undertook that you feel made a significant contribution to the team efforts? What problems did you face during Teamwork and how you tackle the situation? If there was any reason for not fully contributing, please summaries briefly here. [10]
b) Team formation is an important activity during this course briefly summaries the team organization, its effectiveness in completing the project and the responsibilities that you had in this work. What skills have been developed by the team over the period of the project? [10]
c) Time management is an essential skill while working in a team, briefly describes how does your time management fit in with the needs of the team work and what efforts did you make to manage your time effectively? [10]
 The answer to this question should be an essay of between 600 and 800 words in total.
 Screen shot of your posts to LMS at least five (5), which reflects your contribution during the team formation and the activities carried out during the project.
Individual response
30 QUESTION – 2 (This question is based on first four activities 1, 2, 3, and 4 and after completing these activities, you need to submit the following deliverable, along with Questions 3 - 6)
The team needs to submit a single document that should include the following:
 The overall rank order that represents the agreed view of the whole team about the websites that have been evaluated.
 An explanation of the mechanism by which you arrived at your collective ranking.
 Your summary of the different aspects of the team work and suggestion(s) for improvement (maximum 250 words).
 At least four screen shots (1 for each activity which you have posted on LMS) to be provided for each individual member of the team as team response.
Team Response
10 QUESTION – 3
Give a list of the major two subsystems that you have identified for the client’s system. Identify which stakeholder requirements will be met by which subsystem,
Team response
10
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and indicate any areas of overlap.
 The answer to this question should be no more than 250 words in total, in addition to any tables or diagrams supporting your answer. It should be a copy of a shared document that has been agreed by the team as a result of the team activities.
 This is a report to the company itself which will do the work (the one in the scenario), although it may be seen by the client. QUESTION – 4
How has the team evolved over the project span? What aspects have become more effective or less effective, and how has the team reflected on and evaluated its own performance?
 The answer to this question should be no more than 300 words in total, and should also be a copy of a shared document agreed by the team.
Team response
15 QUESTION – 5
What are your team’s proposals for the home page of the website for your proposed system and for the 4 pages directly accessible from the home page?
 The answer to this question should be no more than 400 words in total, in addition to any tables, diagrams or screenshots illustrating your answer. Your answer to this question is the final progress report for this milestone. It should be directed to the company and not to the client; although the client will see it and it should therefore be understandable by the client. In particular, it requires the team to report on the results of your consideration of the content and presentation of a website interface for the system that you proposed.
Team response
15 QUESTION – 6
What are your team’s overall recommendations to the client at this stage of your investigations into their problem, as described in the Scenario?
 The answer to this question should be no more than 500 words in total, not counting the material included as appendices. It should be a copy of a shared document that has been agreed by the team. Your answer should take the form of a short report based on the team activities and decisions made during the whole project. It should bring together the results of your activities in a form that could be presented to the client as an initial proposal for the new system they need in order to manage their business more effectively.
Team response
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End of TMA.