The Project Page

The semester long project is an important component of the course and helps students apply the knowledge gained in the course to the focussed study of a particular topic. I maintain a list of project ideas from years past. Information about preparing project proposals is available in this page. Project proposals are due February 8.

All completed project reports are due on the final exam date and students will be required to present their work to the class. Completed project reports are required to be marked up in HTML and published on the Web.

Preparing the project proposal

The objective is to get you started on thinking about the project and to provide me with enough information to help you produce a quality product. The proposal should be two to three pages long and should contain the following information. Refer to the Textbook and other resources page for project resources.

• What is the focus of the project? I would like you to specify this focus in terms of answers to the following questions. You may not have all the answers but give me your best guess. Nothing is cast in stone and as you learn more about the problem you can make changes.
  1. what is the decision process/decision context that you seek to address?

  2. what are the goals/objectives of the decision support system?

  3. In what manner do you see the system being integrated into the work practices of the eventual end users of the system?

  4. what types of information will the system require?

  5. what type of modeling/information technology will the decision support system use?

  6. Who is/are the end user(s) of the system and in what way will they obtain access to the system?

• Is there an organizational problem you are familiar with that needs decision support? Think back to internships, systems projects and the like.

• Are you working with an organization currently that has a decision support problem?

• How do you propose to go about colecting the resources needed to work on the project? What are an initial list of sources?

• Does the project involve working with an organization?

• What types of enabling technology are required?