Project Plan For Information System Development For ICF Essay.

For the purpose of this assignment, you are assumed to be one of the software consultants appointed to shoulder the system analysis responsibilities in, Global Business Systems in the project outlined in the case study.

You will plan and manage the project as well as investigating and documenting its system requirements. For your Assignment 1 submission, you will produce a report that discusses this project based on your understanding of it and the related investigation results through the items below.

Introduction:

• Introduce the case study and define the project objectives.
• Identify the aims of the report.

Task 1:

Approaches to Systems Development

• How would International Charity Foundation (ICF) go about developing its information systems? Which information system development approach would ICF take?
• Justify your choice of your selected approach/ methodology to systems development.

Task 2:

Systems Requirements

• Identify and list all primary functional requirements for the system in the case study.
• Identify and list all non-functional requirements for the system in the case study. Justify why you would like to have these non-functional requirements.

Task 3:

Project Cost Benefit Analysis

• Discuss your Project Cost Benefit Analysis.
• Provide an excel spread sheet with details in a Project Cost Benefit Analysis.

Task 4:

Project Schedule

• Show a work breakdown structure which follows your choice of approach/ methodology and a project schedule as a Gantt chart. Briefly explain both of them and discuss how they relate to each other.
• Given the system goals, requirements, and scope as they are currently understood, is the project schedule reasonable? Why or why not?

Task 5:

System Information Requirement Investigation Techniques

• Who are the stakeholders involved?
• Explain your choice of the 3 most useful investigation techniques.
• Justify the usefulness of these 3 investigation techniques.
• Summarize the reports and reflect on the outcomes.
• Appropriate references are used and properly formatted Harvard style. References are cited properly in the text where necessary.

Students are advised to observe the word count in each section when developing the report.

• Title Cover Page with clear details of course title/name, student number/name, lecturer & tutor
• Introduction

o Introduction must clearly introduce the case study and define the project objectives.

o Introduction must identify the aims of the report.

• The Approach to Systems Development

o How would ICF go about developing its information systems? Which information system development approach would ICF take?

o Justification for your chosen approach to system development.

• Systems Requirements -

o Identify and list all primary functional requirements for the system in the case study.

o Identify and list all non-functional requirements for the system in the case study. Justify why you would like to have these non-functional requirements.

• Project Cost /Benefit Analysis
• Project Schedule -

o Show work breakdown structure in the project as well as the project schedule Gantt Chart?

o What are they and how do they relate to each other?

o Given the system goals, requirements, and scope as they are currently understood, is the project schedule reasonable? Why or why not?

• System Information Requirement Investigation Techniques

o List the stakeholders involved.

o Explain your choice of the 3 most useful investigation techniques.

o Justify the usefulness of these 3 investigation techniques.

• Reflections and Conclusions

o Provide a brief summary of your findings

o Present your reflections about this project (e.g. achievement and constraints).

• References (must complete by showing 1 or more references with their related in-text citations)

Task 1: Approaches to Systems Development

Introduction to the Case Study

The case study is based on an organization named International Charity Foundation (ICF) that provides educational and medical assistance to the young people around the world who have little or no financial support. The company (known as Rotary Club of Box Hill Central at that time) initially started out for providing assistance to one particular little girl who was sent overseas to Australia for medical treatment. Using charity, ICF raised sufficient funds for the treatment of the little girl. Noticing the success of this venture, one of the members of the club Mr. Colin MacFarlane set up ICF for supporting more children for education and medical assistance. Initially growing in Australia, the company now provides assistance to children in numerous countries around the world.

Currently, most of the operations at ICF are done manually and the records are kept as hardcopies in the form of paper documents. Naturally, both of these have negative impacts on the organization especially when there are demands for faster and more efficient operations. The purpose of this report is to develop a project plan for the development of an information system that will replace the entire manual process and the use of paper documents for record keeping. The aims of the report are hereby specified as follows.

• To specify the approach for system development
• To specify the requirements of the proposed system
• To undertake cost benefit analysis of the project
• To develop an overall schedule for the project

Before determining an approach for systems development of the proposed project, it is first needed to specify the requirements of the proposed information system. The proposed requirements and features of the proposed system include the following.

Online Enrolment System – The system is required to provide an online enrolment system through which the children can be enrolled for financial help in education and healthcare requirements. In the current process, the process is done manually through paper application forms. This process is slow, less efficient and also results in numerous errors during enrolment. In the online system, no manual handling will be necessary for the enrolment process. This feature will require downloading an online application form, filling it and upload it again in the enrolment portal.

Portal for Clients – There should be a specific portal for clients who will be able to donate money to the organization through a specific payment gateway provided in the portal. The payments made through this gateway will be directly collected in the bank account of the organization. The clients will be provided with an online receipt for the donations made at the end of each year.

Task 2: Systems Requirements

Stock Tracking – Another important feature of the system is tracking of the available stock. It has been a common occurrence when the stock has not been checked before purchase and there has been significant amount of wastage of food and resources due to purchase of excess amount. There have also been cases when the stock level was not checked and there was shortage of supply of resources.

It has been found that there will only be one system developed and a number of major features are to be incorporated. Hence, the most suitable system development methodology will be rapid application development (RAD) (Wasson 2015). In this systems development method, prototyping technique is used to design and test the prototypes of the features mentioned. After the tests are completed, the full versions are developed from the prototypes.

This particular method will enable the developer to develop prototype of the different features all at the same time instead of one by one, thus reducing the time needed for the project. Furthermore, after the development of the features, they can be easily integrated into one system and hence, RAD is the most suitable methodology for the development of the system.

The functional and non-functional requirements of the system are shown in the following table.

Functional Requirement	Role in the System
Enrolment Database	Storage of information of all the children enrolled in the specific programs
Stock Database	Storage of all stock information (updated every day)
Customer Care	Online chat system for interacting with customer care personnel (in case of unavailability of personnel, the users will be able to leave a message on the chat)
Non-Functional Requirement	Role in the System
Payment Security	To ensure security while transferring amount from sponsor to fund
Access to Downloadable Content	The users will be able to download online content like enrolment form, payslip and others
Regular Stock Tracking	Tracks available stock and update inventory every day after entry of resource allocation or resource procurement

The non-functional requirements have been such chosen that they will be able to support the features of the functional requirements. In order to make the features of the functional requirements work, the non-functional requirements also have to work in the right way.

The cost benefit analysis is used to estimate the monetary benefits from the project. The cost benefit analysis for the project is shown below.

Project Cost-Benefit Analysis
Analysis Variables:
Discount Rate Used	10.00%
Annual Benefits	$   108,000.00
Annual Operational Costs	$     23,200.00
One-Time Development Cost	$   250,000.00
				Year of Project
		0	1	2	3	4	5	TOTALS
Economic Benefit		$0.00	$        108,000.00	$        108,000.00	$          108,000.00	$        108,000.00	$      108,000.00
Discount Rate		1.0000	0.9091	0.8264	0.7513	0.6830	0.6209
PV of Benefits		$0.00	$98,181.82	$89,256.20	$81,142.00	$73,765.45	$67,059.50
NPV of all BENEFITS		$0.00	$          98,181.82	$        187,438.02	$          268,580.02	$        342,345.47	$      409,404.97	$     409,404.97
One-Time COSTS		$(250,000.00)
Recurring Costs		$0.00	$         (23,200.00)	$         (23,200.00)	$           (23,200.00)	$         (23,200.00)	$       (23,200.00)
Discount Rate		1.0000	0.9091	0.8264	0.7513	0.6830	0.6209
PV of Recurring Costs		$0.00	$         (21,090.91)	$         (19,173.55)	$           (17,430.50)	$         (15,845.91)	$       (14,405.37)
NPV of all COSTS		$(250,000.00)	$       (271,090.91)	$       (290,264.46)	$         (307,694.97)	$       (323,540.88)	$     (337,946.25)	$    (337,946.25)
Overall NPV								$      71,458.72
Overall ROI
								0.2114

Table 1: Cost Benefit Analysis

FIGURE 1: Work Breakdown Structure of the Project

(Source: Created by Author)

FIGURE 2: Gantt Chart of the Project

(Source: Created by Author)

The work breakdown structure is a breakdown of all the work packages involved in the project and the Gantt chart is used to determine the estimated schedule for the project. Both of these are related to each other as without the work breakdown structure, the Gantt chart cannot be developed for a project.

There are a number of stakeholders involved in this project who will need to perform various roles throughout the course of the project. These stakeholders are listed below.

Name of the Stakeholder	Stakeholder Designation	Stakeholder Role
Nick	Project Manager	Supervising and managing the entire project
Tony	Finance and Expense Manager	Managing the finances and expenditures in the project
Bruce	Supervisor of  IT and Project	Supervision of the project and regular reporting to the project manager
Steve	Information System Developer	Development of the information system along with all the features
Clint	Information System Tester	Testing of the system after development
Stephen	Trainer	Training of the employees regarding management and maintenance of the system

System investigation techniques are mainly deployed to investigate the working of the system and identify any issue that may be causing disruption of the working of the system. Some common investigation techniques that are used commonly are as follows.

Task 3: Project Cost Benefit Analysis

Personal Interview / Questionnaire – One of the best investigation techniques is the interview system in which the employees are interviewed to know whether they are facing any issues or problems while working on the system (Fleming and Koppelman 2016). There are several methods of conducting the interviews that include personal interviews, questionnaire based interviews and others.

Monthly System Testing – Another method that can be utilized for system investigation is monthly system testing. At the end of each month, the system will be tested to determine whether there are any issues associated with it.

Monitoring – This is a continuous process i.e. the system is kept under constant monitoring in order to determine whether the system is working according to the requirements or whether there are any issues occurring frequently (Marchewka 2014).

These system investigation techniques have been chosen as in all of these techniques, the issues and problems of the system can easily be detected. Based on the issues detected and identified, suitable steps can be taken to ensure these issues are solved in due course.

Conclusions

This report is developed to determine an appropriate project plan for the proposed information system development for ICF. Based on the estimation, the project will require 88 days for completion and an overall budget of $250,000. Furthermore, this project is follow RAD methodology that will help the developer to prepare and test prototype before proceeding to final version of the system.

From this project, I had gathered significant amount of knowledge on project management as well as various system development methodologies associated with it. I have learnt the application of appropriate of system development methodology based on the requirement and nature of the project.

References

Fleming, Q.W. and Koppelman, J.M., 2016, December. Earned value project management. Project Management Institute.

Marchewka, J.T., 2014. Information technology project management. John Wiley & Sons.

Wasson, C.S., 2015. System engineering analysis, design, and development: Concepts, principles, and practices. John Wiley & Sons.

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Abrahamsson, P., Salo, O., Ronkainen, J. and Warsta, J., 2017. Agile software development methods: Review and analysis. arXiv preprint arXiv:1709.08439.

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El Hameed, T.A., Latif, M.A.E. and Kholief, S., 2016. Identify and Classify Critical Success Factor of Agile Software Development Methodology Using Mind Map. Int. J. Adv. Comput. Sci. Appl, 7(5).

Harrison, F. and Lock, D., 2017. Advanced project management: a structured approach. Routledge.

Nicholas, J.M. and Steyn, H., 2017. Project management for engineering, business and technology. Routledge.

Heagney, J., 2016. Fundamentals of project management. Amacom.

Larson, E.W., Gray, C.F., Danlin, U., Honig, B. and Bacarini, D., 2014. Project management: The managerial process (Vol. 6). Grandview Heights, OH: McGraw-Hill Education.

Fortino, G., Guerrieri, A., Russo, W. and Savaglio, C., 2015, October. Towards a development methodology for smart object-oriented IoT systems: a metamodel approach. In Systems, Man, and Cybernetics (SMC), 2015 IEEE International Conference on (pp. 1297-1302). IEEE.