Manage and Coordinate IS Project - MediSupply Direct

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.