Select a title which reflects the topic under investigation. The title is the first thing that the reader sees, and can influence the reader's view.

This section should contain background information about the organisation for whom you are creating the project. It should allow the reader to understand the nature, size and type of organisation involved, because they may know nothing about the organisation at this point. It should also contain a section explaining your connection with the organisation, how your attention was drawn to the problems, and the reasons why you selected the problem.

• Name of organisation;
• What does the organisation do - activities, etc;
• Location and catchment area;
• Name of person in charge;
• Members of staff;
• Turnover;
• Number of members or customers;
• Meeting or Opening times.

• What is your link with the organisation?
• Briefly describe the problem
• What drew your attention to the problem?
• Reasons for solving the problem:

• From the point of view of the organisation;
• From the point of view of your A/AS course.

This section should contain an investigation into the tasks required to solve the problem for the organisation. A realistic investigation, with documented evidence, should be carried out.

If you are about to create a totally new system, which does not exist in this organisation, then you should try to find other, similar examples of the tasks to be investigated. These could exist in similar organisations. How do they perform the tasks?

If the tasks are presently undertaken by the organisation, and your intention is to improve them for your project, then you should conduct an investigation into how these are being done. You could also look at other organisations as described above.

Any documents relevant to the investigation should be placed in an Appendix, and reference made to it from this section.

• Possible methods that can be used to investigate problem.
• Methods used to conduct the investigation. Include evidence of using these methods.

From the investigation carried out you should now be able to analyse the problem by identifying and describing the tasks to be undertaken. If the task to be described is complex, it may be easier to break it down to sub-tasks and describe those (Top-down method).

This section could include the following points:

• Title of the task;
• Purpose of the task;
• If it is done at present, describe the current method else describe the method used by similar organisations;
• Whatever method described remember to include:

• a description of data used;
• source of the data (provided by user or already stored by the organisation);
• media used for capturing or storing data;
• the need for that data - what processing is done;
• what is output produced, in what form and on what media;

• A diagram e.g. a Data Flow Diagram or System Flowchart could be included.

• What problems does the organisation find in performing the tasks in this way, or if the task does not exist, what problems can you envisage, and wish to avoid e.g. what are the problems of storing data on paper?

Here you need to specify the problem areas that you are going to solve. This section must be based on the findings of the previous section. List the tasks that you are going to improve, and explain the reason for your selection. Also, describe how far you intend to go with your solution.

• The problems you intend to solve (i.e. tasks to be improved);
• The reasons for your selection;
• The extent of the improvement;
• Constraints which prevents you going as far as you'd like to go;
• The problems which are not going to be solved in your current project, and the reasons for this.

This section is based on the previous section. For the problem(s) to be solved, you need to give a list of objectives which need to be met in order for the task to be improved. Examples of areas which require improving could include, storing and retrieval of data.

If the present method of storing data uses a paper based filing system, and the investigation and analysis of this tasks indicates problems such as a large amount of physical space being taken up in a small office, and in your Problem Definition it was specified that the current data storage method needs to be improved, one objective could be that data files take up less physical space.

• a list of objectives to be met in order to improve that task.

{Any improvements to the user interface should be listed here}

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