Coursework
Digital Design & Innovation (MIS 3504)
Taking digital design & innovation with Professor Moustafellos was a great learning experience that I heavily relied upon at my internship at Grant Thornton. Specifically, I worked with an external business analyst to elicit and construct business rules consolidation. Having the practice of creating a business plan and learning how to efficiently create business rules for the class project client, “BeHeardPhilly” gave me insight into:
- How to conduct myself at SME interviews
- What questions to ask to understand business processes
- Construct workflow charts
Though I was unable to apply my knowledge of JustInMind, a prototyping software, to an earlier internship at a manufacturing plant, I easily see how I could have produced better results, had I taken the class sooner. I worked with the IT department to develop an intranet application for a customer price-tier system, an additional financial module on PRMS for automating general ledger allocations, and a product quote system. Explaining the end product and purpose of these applications was difficult, especially since the work force was heavily used to manual processes. Creating a quick prototype to show the end result and work flow throughout would have better depicted my role to SMEs and made it easier for me to elicit requirements and document work processes.
Enterprise IT Architecture (MIS 2501)
The most valuable takeaway I had from this course was the ability to conceptualize business value from IT project proposals and structure a business plan around it. I learned how to quantitatively illustrate:
- Trade-offs between technologies
- Service cost, quality, and deployment time
Culminating this quantitative knowledge in the form of a business proposal prepared me to articulate to “upper-management” a strong case for or against a technology.
Data Centric Application Development (MIS 3501)
This course provided me with a fundamental programming background and helped me develop the skills to create interactive, database-driven websites. Though I have not directly used the takeaways from this class at my internships (i.e. creating websites in PHP), I have applied my experiences in
- Methodical thinking and attention to detail
- Structured creativity
Learning to troubleshoot problem on a live-time exam helped me to become more detail oriented in everything I do, and to be able to come up with creative solutions. I use these skills as an ITA (information technology assistant) to help students troubleshoot issues with SAP and Salesforce assignments.
Change Leadership Studio (MIS 3535)
Learning how to think like a project manager has allowed me to better plan and manage change and monitor any progress made and appropriately convey it to the respective shareholders. Having worked with an entrepreneur for the semester-long project, I was able to create order in chaos; entrepreneurial thinking can be at odds with organization, so learning to create a flexible work breakdown structure with buffers for unforeseeable complications was a skill I improved upon throughout the semester. Additionally, learning to manage my team’s efforts, primarily via a RACI matrix, helped me learn how to delegate and segment work throughout the course of a project.