Human Resource Management

 
Teacher: 
   - Ana Paula Ferreira
This was a "normal" subject. No projects (because no one wanted the kind of project our teacher proposed - which meant project and a final exam - we preferred exam only).

I believe that this subject will turn out very useful, because it is all about what I will be in any organization: a Human Resource. It sure is useful to understand better why the management does certain things, and also to learn how to do better for oneself in the future.

Projects in IS Technologies
(Option)

 
Teachers: 
   - Leonel Duarte dos Santos
   - José Carlos Nascimento
The class was divided into various groups, where each group developed its own project.

The task of my group was to Redefine/Enhance the process of managing student internships from the moment they were offered to the University until some student completed it and got his/her mark. This process was done only partly with computers and was highly disintegrated. We performed all tasks ranging from Project Planning and Management, to Requirements Analysis, System Design, Prototyping, Implementation, Testing, Validation and Presentation of the complete integrated solution.

IT/IS Job Markets
(Option)

Teacher: 
   - José Carlos Nascimento
This subject was performed in group. My group's job was to inform students of the current situation of graduated colleagues working in the Information Technology / Information System (IT/IS) Sectors: where they worked, what positions they occupied, satisfactions indices, etc.

For this job, we contacted hundreds of graduated colleagues and asked them to fill inn a small questionnaire. All information was collected in a central database and then processed to give meaningful statistics. The information was synthetized into a digital magazine and also made available on a website.

Corporate Strategy
(Option)

 
Teacher: 
   - Elisabete Sá
Also at this subject the class was divided into groups. Each group developed its own idea of a business and had to develop a coherent corporate strategy to sustain the idea. My group's idea was to develop a completely new technology based upon polymers and nanochips: a mass that could be digitally shaped and designed to look and work like any electronic product (cell phones, spaceship components, laptops, PDAs, etc.). The advantages we had over products developed with existing technology were weight (100x lighter), robustness (1000X more robust), and it would be possible to reprogram the mass in order to adapt to any technological evolutions of the products it was programmed originally to be. One purchase for life, and we would be surviving on product updates in change of a modest fee.

This was "far out" as to business idea, but the point was to develop a consistent and logical corporate strategy - the rest could be fiction.

Also in this subject we enjoyed our newly won freedom, as most of the time was spent developing the project on our own. Only a couple of hours a week were spent attending lectures so that we could interiorize the theory necessary to develop our project. I believe I learnt a lot about how a company must be planned ahead and how various factors influence its success.

Traineeship
at Finibanco
(Banking)

 
Teachers: 
   - Marco Ribeiro (at the Bank)
   - Rui Dinis Sousa (at the University)
   
As this subject was an internship, I spent no time on campus. Monday to Friday, between 8:30 and 16:30, for 4 months, I was completing my internship at Finibanco S.A in Porto, Portugal.

I was assigned a project which consisted of building a system capable of managing the human resources and the bank's organic structure. The idea was to build a central system that would aid other computer systems in the bank doing operations that would involve principally the bank's staff. This would be virtually all systems, because at the very least, the system I was developing would be responsible for user profiles, application accesses and determining hierarchical relations for any application.

During the internship, I filled many roles. I did requirements analysis, which consisted of meetings, informal interviews and investigating existing applications. The result of this work was written documents that needed to be approved by the bank. Later on, there was need for application design, and I did that too - mainly building DER and DFD, but also doing conceptual web modeling. I  principally used the Oracle Designer for this work. After modeling, the time had come to implement the system I had been working on. For that job I had to use HTML DB from Oracle. An excellent tool, but maybe a bit limited for more complex applications, which turned out to be my case. The underlaying database, however, never represented any problems - Oracle 9i. The tests that I carried out were mainly limited to testing HTML form inputs, application logic and data flows at a high level, which turned out to be adequate. Of course, this process of Requirements Analysis, Design, Implementation and Testing was highly iterative. I only designed and built small pieces at the time, after getting the big picture of their role in the complete system. However, I can not discuss details of the project itself due to the bank's policies.

The final result of my internship was a working application, though still not a complete one. Anyway, I wasn't meant to finish the whole system in 4 months, it was far too complex for that. The bank was happy with the result, I was happy and the University too, so I guess the internship was a success. I learned a lot, especially when it came to Oracle technologies and the workings of a bank.