Degree Project in Program Design and Industrial Engineering, First Level, pdikand12Example reports from 2010 (2011 soon available):
http://www.csc.kth.se/utbildning/kandidatexjobb/teknikmanagement/2010/index.php
Kurslitteratur
Rienecker, L. & Jorgensen, P.S. (2008).
Att skriva en bra uppsats. Malmö: Liber.
Beställs hem till Kårbokhandeln och kostar ca. 300kr.
For your final report, use the CSC report templates.
Project theme suggestions
The following project suggestions are first and foremost inspirational. They are quite general, so you can narrow them down and direct them in what ever way you want, in order to formulate an interesting research question. Some of them have allready been touched upon in earlier reports. It is a good idea to look at what has been done. Not only for getting an impression about formal aspects of the reports, but also to get inspiration for your first challenge – to articulate an interesting research question for the specification, which will be your first deliverable. We are also about to formulate some new suggestions. And of course, you are all free to bring in a favourite theme that is altogether different from the suggestions below. The important thing is that you can argue for that it is whithin the scope of the course, Program design and Industrial Engineering. Project management system interface
design
Project management systems have since long been
one of the main branches in the office software genre. While MS Project has
dominated the market, many users have found it cumbersome to use for small and mid-sized
projects, a fact that has created a market for new players with new, more
efficient input and presentation design solutions.
Task: Find a successful ICT implementation project (from
a scientific or popular journal or from anywhere on the net) and summarize the
collaboration between the main stakeholders by using an overview format from
two different Project management systems. Keep the summary simple (when was who
doing what with whom during 10 to 15 key activities of the project) and use the
demo versions of the respective software available on the net to compare the
input and presentation solutions of the two packages.
Software
support for BSC strategy maps
The Kaplan/Norton Balanced Score Card (BSC)
format has become a de facto standard for aligning the accounting of social and
environmental aspects of operations to financial results. The need for such
aligning is great and there is an expanding market for software supporting the
compilation of data and drawing of so called strategy map to visualise and
monitor the accounting results.
Task: Compare two BSC strategy map software support
and report your findings regarding what kind of projects they are suited for
(kind of operations mapped, scope of budget, manpower and skills etc) and their
respective set of design solutions (principles, design patterns and/or
guidelines used).
References
Olve, Nils et al. 2033,
Maiking Scorecards Actionable, balancing strategy and control, Wiley.
Eppler, M.J. and Platts, K.W. 2009. Visual
Strategizing, The Systematic Use of Visualization in the Strategic-Planning
Process, Long Range Planning 42, 42-74. (Available in print.)
Evaluating socio-economic
impact of public services
More and more public services (health care,
education, media, transport etc) become subject to rationalisation through
large scale ICT implementation projects that have extensive impact on both
production and consumption processes. As the complexities and risks of this
kind of projects have been recognized, publicly transparent evaluation efforts
have been made, both on a national and a European scale.
Task: Find, review and compare two public service
system evaluations you think are interesting in respect to how users of
different sorts (professionals, consumers, citizens) are effected by the
respective system evaluatied, with what methods and tools the effects are
accounted for, and in what way the users have been able to influence the design
of the system and the evaluation of it.
Reference:
Alexander Dobrev, Kai
Peng, Tom Jones (2009) The socio-economic impact of the regional integrated EHR
and ePrescribing system in Kronoberg, Sweden, (available in print)
Applying design patterns to web design
Using design patterns to capture good solutions in web design has gained increased popularity, not least through a widely read article about Web 2.0 (by Tim O´Reilly, see references) and through the creation of the open Yahoo! Pattern Library.
Task 1: Pattern analysis
Choose one or a few related patterns from the O´Reilly article and refine the sketch given of the pattern(s) in the article into more worked out definition(s) with problem, forces, solution and example sections. The examples could be taken from the article or be of your own choice from the web.
Task 2: Pattern application
Pick one or a few related patterns defined in the Yahoo! Library and apply it, in free prototyping form, to one or two sites on the web that you think needs revision according to the choosen pattern(s).
References: - Tidwell, J. 2005. Designing Interfaces, Patterns for Effective Interaction Design. O’Reilly 2005. Quite comprehensive online version of book at http://designinginterfaces.com/ - O’Reilly T. 2005. What Is Web 2.0 – Design Patterns and Business Models for the Next Generation of Software. O’Reilly. URL http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/news/2005/09/30/what-is-web-20.html - http://developer.yahoo.com/ypatterns/ Web development frameworks
Makumba is a web development framework for
programmers who know HTML and some query language like SQL. A novice programmer
can start working with Makumba after a training of 1-2 hours. Makumba renders
good scalability for teams and projects: a 10-person team (with membership changing
each year) developed an intranet with several thousand features over the course
of 8 years. Some of the rules of Makumba applications are written in Java, but
the bulk of the application is done in MQL (Makumba's query language, a subset
of Hibernate HQL) and HTML. Makumba is available in JSP (Java Server Pages) as
a "tag library". Since most aspects of development (viewing data,
entering and modifying data, authentication, authorization) can be done in
Makumba using queries or query fragments, Makumba is said to be query-centric.
References
Task suggestion 1 : Unified Expression Language implementation
for Makumba
Makumba is currently implemented as a JSP
tag library. A much more portable implementation of Makumba would be to
implement it as a Unified Expression Language (UEL) resolver. UEL is a new Java
standard which is expected to have a large impact. An UEL-based Makumba would
work in JSP, JSF and anywhere else UEL is used. The task is to make a proof of
concept implementation of Makumba in UEL.
Task suggestion 2: Web development framework market
analysis
Although Makumba has proven to be an
efficient platform, it is still not widely known outside its initial community.
The task is to compare Makumba with frameworks on the same “market” and make
recommendations to the Makumba community as to what they should do
management-wise, technology-wise, promotion-wise in order to make Makumba
better known.
Interface modeling
The Ontoucp project (www.ontoucp.org) has
put forward a way to generate user interface from a dialog model. For a given
human-machine dialog, a dialog model can be made in the form of a tree which
has "communicative acts" as its leaves and "rethorical
relations" as nodes. From that model, the Ontoucp tools can generate a
user interface. The user interface can then be adjusted, while it still stays
consistent with the original dialog model.
Task: Model a human-machine dialog for a flight booking website. Generate
user interface from it and test the result against a simple flight booking
application logic that you program in Java. Report by comparing the modeling
approach with user interface programming approaches that you are familiar with,
and by making an evaluation of the modeling tools you used to make the dialog
model and to adjust the user interface.
References
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