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A systems analysis interview is a
structured meeting between the analyst and an interviewee who is usually a
member of staff of the organization being investigated. The interview may be
one of a series of interviews that range across different areas of the
interviewee's work or that probe in progressively greater depth about the tasks
undertaken by the interviewee. The degree of structure may vary: some
interviews are planned with a fixed set of questions that the interviewer works
through, while others are designed to cover certain topics but will be
open-ended enough to allow the interviewer to pursue interesting facts as they
emerge. The ability to respond flexibly to the interviewee's responses is one
of the reasons why interviews are so widely used. Interviews can be used to
gather information from management about their objectives for the organization
and for the new information system, from staff about their existing jobs and
their information needs, and from customers and members of the public as
possible users of systems. While conducting an interview, the analyst can also
use the opportunity to gather documents that the interviewee uses in his or her
work. It is usually assumed that questionnaires are used as a substitute for
interviews when potential interviewees are geographically dispersed in branches
and offices around the world. The widespread use of desktop video conferencing
may change this and make it possible to interview staff wherever they are. Even
then, questionnaires can reach more people. Interviewing different potential
users of a system separately can mean that the analyst is given different
information by different people. Resolving these differences later can be
difficult and time-consuming. One alternative is to use group interviews in
order to get the users to reach a consensus on issues. Dynamic Systems
Development Method (DSDM) is a method of carrying out systems development in
which group discussions are used (Stapleton, 1997). These discussions are run
as workshop for knowledgeable users with a facilitator who aims to get the
users to pool their knowledge and reach a consnsus on the priorities of the
development project.
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| Advantages and disadvantages |
+ Personal contact allows the analyst to be responsive
and adapt to what the user says. Because of this, interviews produce high
quality informationus
+ The analyst can probe in greater depth about the
person's work than can be achieve with other methods.
+ If the interviewee has nothing to say, the interview
can be terminate
- Interviews are time-consuming and can be the most
costly form of fact gathering
- Interview results require the analyst to work on
them after the interview: the transcription of tape recordings or writing up of
notes.
- Interviews can be subject to bias if the interviewer
has a closed mind about th problem.
- If different interviewees provide conflicting
information, it can be difficult to resolve later
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Appropriate situations
Interviews are appropriate in most projects. They can
provide information in depth about the existing system and about people's
requirements from a new system
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| 3. Observation |
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Watching people carrying out their
work in a natural setting can provide the analyst with a better understanding
of the job than interviews, in which the interviewee will often concentrate on
the normal aspects of the job and forget the exceptional situations and
interruptions which occur and which the system will need to cope with.
Observation also allows the analyst to see what information people use to carry
out their job. This can tell you about the documents they refer to, whether
they have to get up from their desks to get information, how well the existing
system handles their needs. One of the authors has observed staff using a
tele-sales system where there was no link between the enquiry screens for
checking the availability of stock and the data entry screens for entering an
order. These tele-sales staff kept a pad of scrap paper on the desk and wrote
down the product codes for all the items they had looked up on the enquiry
screens so that they could enter them into the orderprocessing screens.
This kind of information does not always emerge from interviews. People are not
good at estimating quantitative data, such as how long they take to deal with
certain tasks, and observation with a stopwatch can give the analyst plentiful
quantitative data, not just about typical times to perform a task but also
about the statistical distribution of those times. In some cases where
information or items are moving through a system and being dealt with by many
people along the way, observation can allow the analyst to follow the entire
process through from start to finish. This type of observation might be used in
an organization where orders are taken over the telephone, passed to a
warehouse for picking, packed and despatched to the customer. The analyst may
want to follow a series of transactions through the system to obtain an
overview of the processes involved. Observation can be an open-ended process in
which the analyst simply sets out to observe what happens and to note it down,
or it can be a closed process in which the analyst wishes to observe specific
aspects of the job and draws up an observation schedule or form on which to
record data. This can include the time it takes to carry out a task, the types
of task the person is performing or factors such as the number of errors they
make in using the existing system as a baseline for usability design.
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| Advantages and disadvantages |
+Observation of people at work provides first hand
experience of the way that the current system operates.
+Data are collected in real time and can have a high
level of validity if care is taken in how the technique is used.
+ Observation can be used to verify information
from other sources or to look for exceptions to the standard procedure.
+ Baseline data about the performance of the
existing system and of users can be collected.
- Most people do not like being observed and are
likely to behave differently from the way in which they would normally behave.
This can distort findings and affect the validity.
- Observation requires a trained and skilled
observer for it to be most effective.
- There may be logistical problems for the
analyst, for example, if the staff to be observed work shifts or travel long
distances in order to do their job.
- There may also be ethical problems if the
person being observed deals with sensitive private or personal data or directly
with members of the public, for example in a doctor's surgery
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Appropriate situations
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Observation is essential for gathering quantitative
data about people's jobs. It can verify or disprove assertions made by
interviewees, and is often useful in situations where different interviewees
have provided conflicting information about the way the system works.
Observation may be the best way to follow items through some kind of process
from start to finish.
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