4105 Spring 2002: Senior Design II |
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Material from 4104 (Senior Design I)Course Objectives Over a period of two semesters, the Senior Design course sequence provides: a problem analysis and system design experience similar to ISyE
professional practice, and Systems analysis and design including the ability to define a problem, You have chosen a field that demands effective written communication. Your skill in documenting the results of your work will determine to a large extent the value of that work. In addition to developing good writing skills, you should explore the possibilities offered by computing and networked information systems. Subject to any constraints imposed by your company, you may want to publish appropriate reports on the World Wide Web, and use the Internet for communication and collaboration. Public Speaking It is not enough to do good work, you must also convince others, who may be apathetic or even antagonistic, that the work is good. Your skill in clear, concise, and convincing presentation may make the difference between a successful project and fruitless effort. Team Work Life in the real world entails working together with people from different backgrounds, interests, styles, and temperaments. You will learn to cooperate with a diverse group of individuals and coordinate your activities with others in your group and your client, even when there are conflicting priorities. Successful groups learn to work harmoniously, complete the work on time, and prepare effective and well-written reports. Project Management Getting things accomplished when several people and organizations are involved requires several important skills. You will learn to set and manage expectations, deliver value quickly while you have your contact's attention, plan your time wisely and coordinate your efforts with others involved in the project.
Use this opportunity to find out more about the kind of career you want and as a launch pad for that career. This is a chance for you to find out about a prospective occupation or even a future employer. This is also an opportunity for future employers, customers or clients to find out about you. Even if you do not later work for your project company, your experience with them can help you get a good job and might help you do a good job. This course provides an opportunity for you to learn about the business world. Keep your eyes and ears open to your company's culture. Find out how the company has distinguished itself from its competitors, how it projects itself externally and how it views itself internally. To be successful in this course, your recommendations must be consistent with the company's strategy and culture. More than that, to be successful in your career, you must be sensitive to your employer's, your competitors' and your customers' corporate strategy and culture.
Faculty Advisors After your team has a project definition (Report 1), you will be assigned a faculty advisor. You are responsible for keeping your advisor informed of your intentions and progress. You may, however, call upon any of us or any other faculty for advice and assistance. Project Teams Each project team will have six members, and you are free to form your own team. Remember that in joining a team you are committing to carry your share of the responsibility and in asking someone to join your team you are accepting responsibility for the quality of his/her work. Your advisor is not responsible for browbeating laggards into shape. If your team members do not carry their share of the load, you will have to carry it for them. On ????, you must submit the list of team members(names and phone numbers). Attach to this list (S1) a one-page résumé for each member describing professional interests and experience (if any) together with a schedule of the courses you are taking this semester. Designate one person as the lead contact. Selecting a Company and Project
Each team must identify an institution and a suitable project. Choose your institution and your project carefully. This is a strategic decision. Remember, this course offers a valuable opportunity to distinguish yourself. Do not throw it away by choosing a project haphazardly. The undergraduate office maintains a file in which you will find letters from a few companies specifically requesting senior design groups. The location about this file will be announced later. The faculty advisors (as well as other ISyE professors) may have information about other possible projects. If you have not yet found a company and a project, you are already far behind and well on your way to wasting the most valuable opportunity of your undergraduate education! Be creative in your search for projects. Although we would like to work with companies that you have interest to work there when you are graduated, if you have troubles to contact the company, you can either talk to me or consider less traditional areas of endeavor, e.g., Hospitals Be extremely circumspect in all your communications. Initially, you will not know the corporate culture, so it is best to tread lightly and be extremely polite. You are not under any obligation to accept a project, but be sure not to leave any loose ends. If you decide not to take a project be sure to thank -- in writing -- everyone you contacted and politely explain that you have found something else. When you think you have found a suitable project, prepare a description of the firm and a definition of the proposed project and submit it for approval. This is Report 1. In fact, we expect you to turn in descriptions of two separate projects: one clearly identified as the primary project, and the other as a back-up. We expect you to spend at least 6 hours on this project each week for the next two semesters. That comes to about 200 hours for each team member or 1,200 hours for each team. This represents about 50% of one full-time working year. A junior industrial engineer costs approximately $100,000/year including benefits, etc. Your efforts should add at least about $50,000 to the value of your company. This should be the absolute lower limit. If you view the time spent as the equivalent of a consultant's time over the same period, worth about $2,000 per day, the value comes to about $300,000. In most cases, it is not unreasonable to expect this much saving to the client as a result of your project. Please use these figures to help you choose your project. Preparing the Proposal Attached is a guideline format for Report 2, the Project Proposal. Your proposal will be regarded as a "contract", and you will be expected to perform as promised both by your company and by your faculty advisor. Relationships with Companies The project will require considerable time and effort from employees of your company. This represents an expense. Nevertheless, companies participate in these projects for three reasons: they expect to receive valuable assistance, Students are not allowed to receive compensation for work done in ISyE 4104-5. Companies may provide assistance in the form of photocopying and typing services, and in some cases, supplies and travel expenses. We recommend you give your company a copy of this entire handout. You may also want to give them the URL for the course. Once again, settle all contacts you make with prospective firms. Once you decide on your project, write the other firms you have contacted to inform them that you will be unable to work with them, and thank them for the cooperation and time they have given you. Act as Professionals You should function as if you were an employee reporting to your faculty advisor and to your corporate contact. Among others, you should: Keep your client's best interests as your paramount concern.
The Challenge of Design The Senior Design sequence is probably the most valuable course in the curriculum. It is also one of the most difficult. Your problems will not be clearly defined, relevant data will be unavailable or hard to obtain, the proper analysis techniques may not be apparent, solutions will not be exact, and you will disagree about the right course of action. After working two months on a project you may discover you are on the wrong track and that the real problem lies elsewhere. This is your challenge. You will face situations unlike those presented in textbook examples. You will need to recall material from the many courses you have taken at Tech and your faculty advisor will expect you to demonstrate competence in all of them. On top of this, you will have to learn new material not covered in your courses, outside your advisor's areas of expertise. Above all, you will be evaluated on how effectively you work, not how hard you work. Your contribution will be measured in terms of the value it adds to the project, not in terms of the hours you spend on it. So, you must not only work hard, you must also work smart. Grading Your faculty advisor prefers to assign the same grade to everyone in your team. However, it is not uncommon to assign different grades depending on the individual contributions. Factors determining your grade include: The value your project has added and the professional level of
your results. (Your faculty advisor will elicit your corporate
contact's opinions of this.) Information for Sponsors The Senior Design Sequence For many years all senior students in the School of Industrial and Systems Engineering have culminated their undergraduate educational experience with the nine-month sequence of senior design courses ISyE 4104-5. Many enterprises in the Atlanta area have cases that can be successfully studied and solved by a small group of industrial engineering students working for experience and academic credit instead of money. Our hundreds of "satisfied customers" include a majority of the well-known businesses in the Atlanta area, and other enterprises such as hospitals and various local city and county government departments. Student groups work as unpaid outside consultants satisfying their interest in a real world design experience. They work on well-defined, specific design activities. Each group spends approximately 1200 hours on the project over the course of nine months. This effort is focused on resolving a specific problem or completing a specific project and is not intended for carrying out day-to-day operations. What the Sponsor Does The first step is for the sponsor to identify a need or opportunity. For example, one year Rich's felt their delivery truck fleet could have better maintenance scheduling; the downtown Marriott felt the need for a more consistent, fair and profitable parking policy; Selig Chemical saw the need to organize their warehouse more efficiently; the Atlanta Journal and Constitution felt its wastage of newsprint could be reduced by a few tons per year; the Bairstow Distributing Company realized they needed to computerize their inventory system; and Rollins Security found their service people could travel a lot less if their trips were better scheduled. When students contacted these enterprises, they found enthusiastic potential sponsors. ISyE students are well prepared to design maintenance schedules, routing and delivery systems, warehouse layouts and materials handling systems, waste control programs, and requirements and specifications for information systems. They can apply operations research, simulation, statistics, and other technical tools to a wide variety of problems, and they can back up their design choices with thorough economic analysis. The steps in participating are: Meet with the student group to explore possibilities, and determine,
loosely, what kind of beneficial project could reasonably be performed
by a neophyte consulting group of industrial and systems engineers
-- usually six students working for about 200 to 300 hours, each,
over nine months. The syllabus and the up-to-date course and presentation schedules are available on the web. We would also like to publish the student reports on the World Wide Web to help the students develop on-line publishing skills and to help future students become familiar with the senior design process. This will be done only with the sponsor's consent, and the sponsor can refuse on-line publication for any reason. Publishing on the web provides free publicity and exposure to the sponsors. In addition, people in the organization who may not be directly involved with the project, but who may benefit nevertheless, can access the reports. If the sponsors consent, we plan to provide unlimited access to Georgia Tech students, faculty, and staff. Access to others will be restricted by password.
Reports Report S1: Project Team ISyE 4104 Fall 2001
Designate team's lead contact with *.
1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.
Will all team members enroll in ISyE 4105 during Summer 2001?
Attach résumés and current schedules.
Guidelines for Report 1: Project Definition ISyE 4104 Fall 2001 Cover Page: Team Identification Where is the organization's headquarters? What kind of business is the organization in? How many people does it employ? Other measures of size, for example annual revenues, market share, annual profits, etc. Similar information about the department you will work with directly. Description of problem symptoms or potential opportunity Be careful to describe a problem, not a solution. For example, "The department needs a new conveyor system" is a poor problem description. A better description would explain the difficulties leading to the conclusion that the company needs a new conveyor system. Not every project is designed to resolve a problem. Some are geared toward improving service, enhancing revenue or entering new markets. In this case, describe the opportunity. Design objective Describe what you hope to accomplish for the company. Be careful not to get locked into foregone conclusions. For example, "Identify the new conveyor system to purchase" is a poor design objective -- a better resolution of the problems may simply involve clever adjustments to the existing system. On the other hand, be sure to have clear, attainable objective: "Solve the company's problems" is not a good design objective either.
Guidelines for Report 2: Project Proposal ISyE 4104 Summer 2001
Detailed outlines for this report often result in similar-looking proposals, few of which are very good. This is obviously undesirable. Therefore, we offer below broad guidelines that you can adapt for your specific project. Whenever you write anything, be sure to have an audience in mind. For whom are you writing this report? Identifying your audience for this report is a bit challenging. In fact you are writing to two very different audiences: your corporate contact (first) and your faculty advisor (second). This causes some peculiar difficulties. For example, although your corporate contact knows more about the company than you do, your faculty advisor does not. On the other hand, while your faculty advisor may be very familiar with some of your proposed methods, your corporate contact may not be. You should include all the information for both audiences, but organize it so that each reader may easily find the material of interest to her. When you describe the organization, for example, write to your faculty advisor, but remember that your corporate contact will be looking over your shoulder. When you describe your methods, on the other hand, write to your corporate client, but remember that your faculty advisor will be looking over your shoulder. Once you have identified your audience, you need to figure out what you want to tell them and how you are going to say it. This is the hard work of writing. You must organize your thoughts and pick your words so your ideas are clear and easy to follow. If your ideas are not clear or you do not have any ideas at all, your writing will be difficult to follow. Conversely, if your writing is difficult to read... So, to the heart of the matter. Your proposal should begin with a cover letter to your corporate contact thanking her for suggesting the project and indicating your desire to work on it. In a sense this letter is a formal request for your contact to accept your proposal as a binding contract. You are bound to do the work described in the proposal and your contact is bound, albeit with less dire consequences to her if she fails, to provide the support you specifically request. The proposal, then, must accomplish two things: It must spell out your expectations from the company (Be sure
to discuss these with your contact before putting them in the
proposal.) and The main body of the proposal should probably begin with a description of the organization your working with (for the faculty advisor) and a brief description of Senior Design (so the company knows what this is all about). Your description of the organization should focus on the department with which you will be working. Next, describe the problem in some detail. Provide quantitative evidence of its magnitude and significance whenever possible. At this point you are ready to describe what the company can expect from you. Begin with a very brief objective, but follow this up with any supplemental information necessary to delineate the project. Include a detailed description of your "deliverables". For example, will you be delivering production code, a working system, a prototype or specifications? Will you provide a method to solve the problem whenever and where ever it arises or will you simply solve the present problem? Estimate the likely benefits to the company. Remember these should be worth at least $50,000, but do not promise what you cannot deliver. In fact, you want to avoid the tragedy that will certainly arise if the company expects more than you give. Provide evidence that you know how to accomplish all that you promise. Describe the specific steps you will take and give a credible schedule of when you will complete them. Describe what you expect from the company. Be sure to discuss each item in detail with your contact before you include it in the proposal. Try to anticipate the kinds of assistance and information you will need and the form you will need it in. Do not get caught in the position of needing key information to complete your project only to discover half way through that it simply is not available! In summary, your proposal should include: A cover letter |
