MIS 120 Term Project Specifications

6 September 2007


PROJECT DESCRIPTION

In this project, you will investigate and evaluate usage of Microsoft® Excel and/or Access within an organization.  You will apply the material and thought processes learned in class to the assessment of such usage.  As part of a three- or four-person team, you will also practice teamwork and allocation of work within project planning.  Additionally, you will provide some of your own motivation for studying these software tools by examining, critically, their ability, or lack thereof, to support managerial objectives of a business enterprise.

Each team will select an organization, obtain its co-operation, interview one or more employees within the organization to learn about its usage of one or both of these software tools, and write a paper describing its investigation and assessment.  Each team member will complete a peer evaluation of the others.

Each paper will differ depending on the organization and usage investigated, but all must include:

  1. A description of the organization and the products and/or services it provides.
  2. A description of the organizational functions and how Microsoft® Excel and/or Access usage supports them.
  3. The impacts of Microsoft® Excel and/or Access usage on the organization.
  4. A criticism of the organization’s use of Microsoft® Excel and/or Access.

PROJECT STEPS

  1. Select a team containing three or four members.
  2. Select an organization and make contact.  You may find it necessary to make contact with more than one person in an organization, or even more than one organization, to elicit a promise of co-operation and participation.  If needed, I'll write a letter to a prospective contact person promising confidentiality.  If you select an organization that employs one or more team members, you must interview someone besides the team member(s).
  3. Write a project plan.  This plan will include a roster of the team, the organization and contact person(s), the scheduled interview date(s), and a short description of what you will be investigating at the organization.  This plan will be typewritten and no more than one page.
  4. Prepare for the interview(s).  Determine interview format and write out questions you will ask (the organization may wish to see this list of questions in advance).  I will review these questions if you wish.
  5. Interview.  Conduct the interview(s) professionally (e.g., with respect to attire, punctuality, and demeanor).  You represent the University of Michigan - Dearborn.  Follow up on the interview(s) professionally.
  6. Work as a team.  You will need to set goals, co-operate, allocate responsibilities, and learn from each other.  Organizations emphasize teamwork and value the ability to provide it (a thought for job searches in your future).  This term project will give you valuable practice in honing these skills.
  7. Write the paper, which is emphatically not just a transcript of the interview.  Analyze the usage of Microsoft® Excel and/or Access, consider how it relates to facts, ideas, and concepts discussed in class and the text, and assess its effect on the organization.  Writing the paper may bring to mind follow-up questions for discussion with your interviewee(s) by follow-up telephone call or e-mail.  You will upload the paper to a plagiarism detection site approved by the university and recommended for School of Management use.  Detailed instructions on this upload will be provided in due course.
  8. Peer review. Each team member must evaluate all others.  List all team members (including yourself) and assign each a number reflecting that member's contribution to the team effort.  The numbers must add to 100.  Add any other comments on your team you wish.  If the team members agree on apportionment of effort, only one peer review need be turned in per team; if they cannot agree, multiple peer reviews (as many as there are disparate opinions) must be turned in and signed.
  9. Thank you letter – I'll write this if you provide me a contact name and address.

DELIVERABLES

  • Project step 3 is due 27 September 2007.  This step isn't separately graded; it provides reassurance to instructor and team members that the project has embarked on a promising track.
  • Project steps 7 and 8 are due 6 December 2007.

PAPER FORMAT

Papers are to be typed (use a word processor, Times New Roman with font size 10 or 12) and single-spaced with double spacing between headings and paragraphs.  The paper should run 5 to 6 pages, exclusive of title page, bibliography, and such.  The first portion of your paper (after a title page listing the authors and specifying the organization and interviewee(s)) should be an executive summary which provides highlights from the paper and summarizes the topics to be discussed in the paper.  It is well for the paper to provide a bibliography.  An appendix page (last) will specify the date(s) and location(s) of the interview(s) and list all people present at the interview(s).
Avoid relying overmuch on web sites for definitive references (as opposed to guidance to sources of reliable, vetted information).  If you doubt the need for this caveat, visit http://www.lhup.edu/~dsimanek/fe-scidi.htm.  The Sheridan Libraries of The Johns Hopkins University provide an excellent site providing guidance in the evaluation of a web site's intellectual and academic reliability and validity.

Avoid even more (indeed, eschew) transcribing paragraphs from an organization's web site into your term paper (in Fall 2001 semester, this intellectual cancer metastasized alarmingly).  Indeed, plagiarism, like exposure to bubonic plague or stepping on stonefish, is best avoided.  The following sites will help you avoid it:

"How Not to Plagiarize" by Margaret Procter, Coordinator, Writing Support, University of Toronto

"Using Sources" by Lisa Trivedi and Sharon Williams of Hamilton College

"Avoiding Plagiarism" from the University of California at Davis

Professor Zachary M. Schrag, a historian and scholar of Columbia University, has courteously permitted linkage to his excellent guide The Anatomy of a Ten-Page Term Paper (scroll down a bit to read it).  Additionally, our own School of Management has explicit and valuable writing guidelines on-line.

 

PROJECT EVALUATION

The best papers will synthesize material from the interview(s), the text, the lectures, other classes, and other experiences of the team members.  A paper which only reports on the interview, without including your assessment of the usage of Microsoft® Excel and/or Access and your defense of that assessment, is deficient and its grade will be at most a "C".

As I read and grade a paper, I will assess:

Content:

  1. Does the paper describe the pertinent usage(s) in an organizational context?
  2. Does the paper discuss the impact of these software tools on the organization?
  3. Does the paper evaluate the organizational usage and make recommendations for its evolution and improvement?
  4. Does the paper synthesize material from the interview with material available from other sources (e.g., textbook, class lectures and discussions)?

Presentation:

  1. Is the paper well-organized, with divisions into sections (with headings) and paragraphs?
  2. Is the paper well written and readable?
  3. Does the paper invoke an image of four or five pieces written by different people in different styles and tied together with pieces of a broken shoelace, or does it invoke an image of an integrated whole carefully honed and polished by a team of people working co-operatively?
  4. Are spelling errors, grammatical errors, and garbled or incomplete sentences conspicuous by their absence?
  5. Does the paper use technical and management terminology appropriately and correctly?

All team members will receive the same grade on the project unless a document (i.e., the peer review(s)) signed by all team members advises me otherwise.

INTERVIEWING SUGGESTIONS

As you plan the interview, decide on its major themes. Some possible themes are:

  1. how the usage of Microsoft® Excel and/or Access influences day-to-day business of the organization
  2. how employees use these software tools in their work
  3. how the usage of Microsoft® Excel and/or Access affects the customer
  4. how the usage of Microsoft® Excel and/or Access helps gain competitive advantage

Remember: this list is indicative, not exhaustive.  Not all themes will be appropriate for all systems, nor for all interviewee(s).

Consider obtaining background information about the organization before the interview(s).

There is a place for three types of questions within the interview:

  1. Open-ended, e.g., "What's your opinion of these software tools?"
  2. Closed-ended, e.g., "Who receives reports from these software tools?"
  3. Follow-up, e.g., "Can you please give me an example of…..?"

Arrange your questions in logical sequence.

Take notes during the interview(s).  Even if you tape the interview (doing so requires explicit permission of the interviewee(s)), your notes will help you remember important items.  Taping may inhibit the discussion, and tapes have a way of being unintelligible at just the wrong places.

Stay flexible – if your interviewee brings up an interesting subject that the team didn't anticipate, follow up on it.

Ask your interviewee(s) if you may call or send email if follow-up questions arise.

Professor Lending's advice (originally pertinent to MIS 310) to assign a project of this type, and her permission to adapt her materials, are gratefully acknowledged.  This project requires a term paper of less than one-half the length, and more straightforward analytically, than does the MIS 310 project, in view of the fact that this is a 100-level (versus 300-level) course.