Overview:
During this phase you will develop a shared understanding (i.e., as a group) of the needs, concerns, and opportunities presented by personal management information (PIM) activities. PIM refes to the management of adress book, calendar, to do list, appointments, and sometimes even emails and some simple project management. You will synthesize and present this understanding in your descriptions of stakeholders and their tasks, as well as a set of problem scenarios and claims.

What to do:

1. Organize and assign roles:
This will be the first time your group has worked together, so you will need to investiagate one another's skills, interests, schedules, etc. You may decide that individuals will take on different roles for this project. Possibilities include meeting scheduler, interviewer, note taker, scenario writer, claims analyst, technical writer, editor and/or proof reader. Note that although specific tasks may become the prime responsibility of one or more members, all members should be familiar with all of the activities that take place...i.e., stay in touch with each other, use status reports.

2. Brainstorm a root concept, develop field study plan:
Your first job will be develop a root concept as described in Chapter 2. This will have a strong influence on the remainder of the project, so think carefully about this. Based on the root concept, you should then develop a field study plan, including selection of people to observe, a schedule for visits or interviews, a guide for asking questions, roles each of you will take on, and so on.

3. Collect data about PIM activities:

• Interview at least three people that keep track of their calendar and address book. They all don't have to use software for this task, a paper way of doing the task is reasonable. Try to interview a varied group of participants as possible, don't pick all students. Try to interview a professor, a secretary at VT, maybe a secretary as a professional's office, etc.


• These interviews should take place after the some observation period, so that you can fold in questions that arise from watching activities. Not everybody likes to be observed while doing this type of task, so make sure you ask first. In making these observations, make sure you try to get some information about the location where these tasks take place. For example, in the case of a secretary, the task usually takes place at his/her desk, but in the case of a student, tasks/information is entered remotely. Make sure you try to cover several different cases.


• Collect at least three artifacts from the setting that are revealing with respect to current activities. These might be photographs of key aspects of the desk, sample copies of a day calendar, month-view, etc.


• You should also research online to see what commercial products exist to help users on this task. There are lots of software that people use, and some hardware too (Palms, and othe handhelds are usually used for this task).
  Also, there are several companies that specialize on paper-based calendars and to-do lists, so try to find out what they are, what paper forms they
  use, etc.

4. Summarize your field data:

• Several stakeholder profiles, one for the person keeping the information, and one for the other stakeholders that have invested interest in the
  information being kept. For example, if you are using students, then there are other students who work/play together who would want to see the
  calendar. Or if you picked a Dr's office, then other stakeholders are the secretary, the patients, etc.
  
• A table listing the central tasks for the stakeholder groups you have profiled.
  
• Two hypothetical stakeholder descriptions, make sure each has with different characteristics and personal contexts.
  
• Analysis of at least two artifacts, summarizing what it conveys about information and procedures.
  

5. Synthesize problem scenarios and claims:
Using your observations, interviews, collected artifacts, and summary analyses as source material, develop six problem scenarios. These scenarios should have a realistic feel to them (i.e., they should be believable), but need not be based on actual episodes observed or described to you. The point is to write scenarios that best convey what you have learned about the problems and opportunities of the people working with this setting. Four of the scenarios should be written from the perspective of your two hypothetical stakeholders, and two from that of other stakeholders. Remember that it is OK (often essential) to include
multiple actors in a scenario, but the story is told from one actor's perspective.

Analyze at least one claim for each scenario. As discussed in Chapter 2, a claim may express issues associated with multiple scenarios. This is fine -- again, the point is to document what you think are the most interesting or critical features of the work setting you have studied, along with your analysis of these features' upsides and downsides. Each claim included should have at least one positive consequence and one negative.

The book has examples of scenarios and claims, but you can review even more examples in the case study library.

6. Prepare your requirements analysis report:
The requirements reports should have the following labeled sections.
Number all pages that follow the Table of Contents, and use tabs or other separators to organize your report so that it is easy to review:

1. Cover Sheet: label the phase as "Requirements Analysis", and include group number, team member names and student numbers, and due date.



2. Table of Contents: list page numbers for each required element.



3. Preparing for the Field Study: the root concept, interview guide(s), as well as any other documents produced in planning the field work.



4. Workplace Artifacts: interview summaries, photographs or other artifacts collected as part of the field work.



5. Workplace Summaries: stakeholder profiles, task list, hypothetical stakeholders, artifact analysis.



6. Problem Scenarios and Claims: the six scenarios. Each scenario should be given an evocative name. The claim(s) analyzed for each scenario should follow the scenario, i.e. resulting in an interleaved ordering of scenario/claim(s).



7. Bibliography: cite sources you used in preparing your analysis.
   This does not including the textbook, so this section is optional and should only be included if relevant.

7. Turn in evaluation forms: Complete and submit by email the
evaluation form available on the web.
This evaluation is due by email to the GTA (Shalini Akella) by 5pm on the same day as the report. Emails received after 5pm will be considered late and the team member will lose points in accordance with the class late policy.
Each student member must submit an evaluation form for each part of the project.

Grading: The project will be evaluated for overall completeness, as well as the quality of each component. The GTA (Shalini Akella) will grade the report using an evaluation form that will be made available later.