Week 2

1. What are the skills and knowledge that a good systems analyst requires?

According to “Systems Analysis and Design” by Shelly, 6^th edition pages 4, 26 and 27, systems analyst is the one who analyse, create, implement and maintain information systems. To handle these overall responsibilities he/she needs much technical knowledge or background. Technical knowledge and skills such as basic programming knowledge, knowledge to analyse and understand the business processes, sound communication knowledge and leadership skills including being flexible are essential to be a successful system analyst. These skills are needed to avoid the over or under estimate the time needed to develop an information system, to communicate with higher, middle and low management, programmers or technical staff and customers, and lead the programming or information systems development team.

1. How do you plan to develop those skills?

To train my self to get the skill that understand and analyse the business processes, I am planning to spend more time on the case studies given on the text book, analyse them and interpret them into technical language. I think this might be more helpful than trying anything else to improve my analytical ability. To improve my communication skill, I am planning to communicate in the tutorial class when there is a time allocate for discussion and make sure that I am communicating without shyness and expressing my ideas to others and planning to write and submit my assignments and check my grades often to make sure I am improving my writing skill. And I am going to improve my programming knowledge by writing some software modules by my self during my free time.

1. It would be helpful for the teaching staff if you could give a brief outline of your experience with the development or use of Information Systems.

I am holding a bachelor’s degree in computer science, this course covered most of the software engineering and programming techniques and I was working as a software developer for more than three years in my home country Sri Lanka. This experience gave me a chance to work and develop wide range of Information Systems for different industries such as garment, electricity and warehouse management. I have used several Information Systems or tools for my day to day life; this includes email systems, word processing systems and various other software systems. I have an experience in using modeling tools such as Rational Rose. I was part of system requirement gathering team, software development team, software testing or quality assurance team and software implementing and maintaining team, this gave me more understanding about the System Analyst’s role in each stage of Software / System Development Life Cycle.