INF09801 Project management for information systems -INF09801 Assessment Brief 2026 | ENU

INF09801  Assessment Brief

Assessment Brief

What This Assessment Asks of You

You will act as the project manager for a realistic IS project and, across the ten teaching weeks, develop a project proposal and plan for it — producing working artefacts as each topic is taught. At the end you will submit those working files as a Process Portfolio (Part A, 50%) and present and defend your work at an Oral Presentation and Viva (Part B, 50%).

This replaces the module's former written essay. The reason is straightforward: a polished document now proves only that a polished document exists. A dated trail of imperfect working artefacts, culminating in a live defence, proves that a person did the thinking. You may use large language models without restriction at every stage — drafting, checking calculations, generating ideas, preparing slides. What is assessed is not the surface polish of your artefacts but (a) how your thinking evolved, and (b) whether you can explain, justify and defend every decision in your portfolio in real time.

The practical implication is worth stating plainly. If you use AI to produce artefacts you do not understand, you will be unable to answer for them at the viva, and the Defence criterion will fail you. If you use AI as a thinking partner, interrogate what it gives you, and record that process, you may do very well. The assessment is designed so that using AI well is rewarded and outsourcing your judgement is self-defeating.

2  Your Project

All students work on the same project: MediSupply Direct (see the scenario document), a pharmaceutical wholesaler that must replace the unsupported legacy ordering client used by its 380 community-pharmacy customers. The scenario is issued with this brief and is the sole basis of the assessment. You act as the project manager for it throughout the trimester. 
A common scenario is used deliberately. It makes the assessment demonstrably fair across the cohort, it lets the taught material be applied to a single evolving case as each technique is introduced, and it allows the viva panel to question every student against the same known constraints — so a strong answer is recognisable and a weak one cannot hide behind an unfamiliar context. It does not mean every student should reach the same answer: the scenario contains genuine tensions with several defensible resolutions, and your marks come from the quality and consistency of your reasoning, not from matching a model solution. 
The scenario is incomplete by design. Where information is missing, make a reasoned assumption, record it in your research journal, and proceed — then be ready to justify it. Assumptions are not weaknesses; undocumented assumptions are.

3  The Ten-Week Artefact Sequence

The taught chapters drive the artefact sequence. You produce each artefact in the week in which its topic is taught — not retrospectively at the end. This is both good practice and a requirement: the portfolio must evidence work done over time, and the weekly Moodle checkpoints create the timestamps that show it.

Table 1  The ten-week sequence. All ten chapters of the module text are covered. The research journal and argument roadmap run continuously throughout. 
Core text book; Project management foundation for information systems  

Note weeks 11 and 12. These complete the project, and they are not optional extras. A plan that schedules and resources a system but never addresses how quality is assured, how the organisation is brought through the change, or how the promised benefits are actually realised is an incomplete plan — and, on the evidence of IS project failure, incomplete in precisely the way that most often proves fatal. In the MediSupply scenario this is acute: 380 pharmacies are customers who cannot be instructed to adopt the new system, so adoption is the project's central risk, not an afterthought. Your portfolio is expected to close that loop.

4  Part A — The Process Portfolio (50%)

You submit your working files, not a polished final paper. The portfolio has two strands: process artefacts that evidence how your thinking evolved, and technical planning artefacts that evidence the learning outcomes themselves.

4.1 Strand 1 — Process artefacts (evidence of thinking over time) 

Table 2  Process artefacts. Each is worth 10% of the module mark (40% in total).

The Argument Roadmap — recommended format

The roadmap is the single most revealing process artefact, and the viva will draw questions directly from it. Keep it to one page, with a row per significant change of

position: 

Table 3  Illustrative Argument Roadmap entries (your content will differ). Each row is a defensible pivot, not a mistake to hide.

4.2 Strand 2 — Technical planning artefacts (evidence of the learning outcomes)

These are the objects the viva questions will probe. Each is produced in the week shown in Table 1 and evidences the learning outcome indicated. 

Table 4  Technical planning artefacts. Collectively worth 10% of the module mark as a portfolio criterion — but they are also the substance the viva examines, where a further 25% is available.

On the stakeholder, communication and change plan. This artefact completes the project and is weighted accordingly in the viva. A system that is delivered but not adopted has failed, and in most IS projects adoption is decided by people the project manager cannot instruct. Your plan should therefore analyse stakeholders by power and interest, set out who is told what and when, address resistance where you expect it, and state how the benefits claimed in your week-2 business case will actually be realised and measured after go-live. Markers will look for consistency between this artefact and your business case: benefits asserted in week 2 and never owned or measured is a common and costly weakness.

On the EVM snapshot. You will not have real actuals, so you construct a defensible scenario: choose a status date, state the assumptions behind your actual costs and earned value, and compute PV, EV, AC, SPI and CPI. The arithmetic matters, but the interpretation matters more — you should be able to say what your indices mean for the project and what you would do about them.

5  Part B — The Oral Presentation and Viva (50%)

The viva is the integrity anchor of the whole assessment and carries half the marks. It is held in weeks 13–14, before the module team, and runs to roughly 15 minutes per student. 

Table 5  Viva format. All sessions are recorded for moderation and external examiner review.

5.1 The presentation

Present the proposal and plan, foregrounding your reasoning: what the project must achieve, the approach you chose, and why you chose it over the alternatives. Show your key artefacts on screen and refer to them as you speak. Do not read a script. Polished slide design earns nothing; clear professional reasoning earns a great deal. Practise to time — a project manager who cannot brief a board in ten minutes has not yet mastered their own plan.

5.2 The questioning

Questions come from two sources. From your own portfolio — for example: “Your argument roadmap shows you abandoned a fixed-price contract recommendation in week 8 — what changed?” And one standard applied question per learning outcome, from a moderated bank. Indicative examples: 

Table 6  Indicative viva probes. Every LO is examined; questions are moderated in advance. The final two rows reflect the completing phases of the project.

The purpose is to test depth. A student who did their own thinking can pivot easily and explain why they chose one approach over another — why CPM rather than a pure Scrum cadence, why that contingency reserve, why that Cynefin classification for a given risk. Expect “what if” probes that are not answered anywhere in your portfolio; that is deliberate, and it is where genuine understanding shows.

Devices are not used during the Q&A. You may refer to your artefacts on the shared screen for the tool walkthrough, but you should not be reading answers.

6  Marking Scheme

6.1 Weighting 

Table 7  Component weighting. A minimum of 30% must be achieved in each Part.

Note the shape of this. The single largest component is depth and accuracy of responses at the viva (25%), and the four process strands together (40%) outweigh the technical artefacts (10%). This is intentional: the artefacts are the vehicle, and your reasoning about them is the substance.

6.2 Rubric summary

Table 8  Rubric summary by criterion. Full grade descriptors follow the University's SCQF Level 9 scheme.

7  AI Use Policy

• LLM use is permitted without restriction at every stage — drafting, calculation checking, idea generation, slide preparation.
• You must log AI use in your research journal: what you asked, what was returned, and how you verified or corrected the output. The quality of this critical engagement is itself credit-bearing under the Reflection criterion — a thoughtful log of where AI misled you and how you caught it is strong evidence, not an admission.
• No AI-detection software is used. Integrity is assured structurally: the dated process trail plus the live viva make outsourced work self-defeating, because unexplainable artefacts fail the Defence criterion.
• Devices are not used during the Q&A portion of the viva. 
   

To be explicit about what misconduct means here: it is not using AI. It is presenting another person's work or decisions as your own, or having someone else undertake your viva. Both are far harder under this format than under written assessment — which is part of why the format changed.

8  Submission, Timing and Support 

Table 9  Key dates. Teaching runs weeks 2–6, 8-12; weeks 13–14 are for consolidating and submitting the portfolio. The weekly journal checkpoint is not administrative

box-ticking — it is the timestamped evidence on which the Process Evolution criterion rests.

Submit native files, not just exports. For LO5 the markers need your actual PM-tool files (.mpp or equivalent) with dependencies, baselines and levelling set in the tool. Screenshots of hand-drawn charts do not evidence tool competence and will be marked accordingly. 
 
Files to be submitted  

Submission: Combine your portfolio and project plan in one file and submit it to Part 1 on Moodle. The working file should be submitted to Part 2 on Moodle and presentation slide on part 3.  

Reasonable adjustments. If you have disclosed adjustments you may opt for a smaller panel, extended preparation time, written question prompts shown on screen, or a recorded asynchronous presentation followed by a shorter live Q&A, in line with University inclusion policy. The viva is retained in adjusted form because it evidences the learning outcomes — only its format flexes. Speak to the module leader early. 
Resit. Resubmission of a revised portfolio plus a fresh 10-minute viva, capped at the pass mark per University regulations.

9  How to Do Well

1. Work weekly, not in bursts. The Process Evolution criterion rewards a genuine dated trail. A portfolio assembled in the last fortnight looks exactly like what it is, and the viva confirms it.
2. Record your wrong turns. A pivot you can explain is worth more than a straight line you cannot. The argument roadmap exists to capture exactly these, and markers look for them.
3. Make your artefacts consistent with each other. The Gantt should match the WBS; the resource plan should match the schedule; the cost baseline should match the business case; the benefits you claim in week 2 should be owned and measured in your week-12 change plan. Inconsistency is the most common way to lose technical marks — and the easiest thing for a viva question to expose.
4. Complete the project, don't just plan it. A schedule and a budget are not a finished piece of project management. Show how quality is assured, how the organisation is brought through the change, how the people you cannot instruct are brought to adopt the system, and how the benefits are realised after go-live. This is where most real IS projects fail, and it is where a strong portfolio distinguishes itself.
5. Ground decisions in the taught frameworks. Cite PRINCE2, ISO 31000, PMBOK 7 and the module text where they informed a choice — specifically, not decoratively. “I classified this risk as Complex under Cynefin, so I chose a probe-sense-respond approach rather than a fixed mitigation” is the register to aim for. 
6. Interrogate the AI, and say so. Where an LLM gave you something wrong or generic and you corrected it, write that down. It is direct evidence of the critical engagement the Reflection criterion rewards.
7. Rehearse the ‘why’, not the ‘what’. Before the viva, take each major artefact and ask yourself: 
   why this technique, why this number, what would I do if it changed? That is what you will be asked. 
8. Build your project honestly, week by week, record how your thinking changed, and be ready to defend every decision you made.