Answer:
Introduction
Allsports Sports Club is the place where many outdoor sports are played by the few thousand members of the club. The club has the facility to play cricket, football and athletic games. The main aim for the report is to analyse the shortcomings in the existing information system the club president is facing to release weekly newsletter.
With this objective the owner of club has awarded the consultancy contract to HighVoltage Information Services to analyse an develop an automated system which can reduce the work load of users, specially the club president and editor.
Best approach of system development:
The club has a tradition of releasing newsletter on every Wednesday with 10 articles written my members on the basis of sports played in past and five articles from outside agencies to generate fund. The release of newsletter is fully supervised by club president. He has a duty to nominate a new editor every week to give all members a fair chance to become editor for the week. The editor needs to cooperate among the users and members to collect the articles and advertisements. Doing these thing and sorting among many thousand members is day by day becoming headache for the cub president. The problems being faced by them are:
Make the list of members not yet been reviewed article for once
Make the list of members not yet got chance to become editor
Sorting the advertisements and article on the basis of their subject
So, with all such issues in the way, every week the newsletter is scheduled to be released, but many times it has been delayed and criticised. So for making the life easy this system should be capable of working independently on the basis of feedback and comments received from the members, and wherever the concern is people related, then Agile suits the best.
Justification for Agile methodology
The problems being faced by the club president and editor is the people centric issue, they do not send the articles on time, they do not send in same format, they are not organised by the subjects and so on (AgileMethodology, 2008). As stated earlier that whenever there is more people oriented system need to be developed, Agile is the best suited. By using the methodology followsing issues can be eliminated:
It can provide a consistence performer along with the transparency level in the system
It can omit the chances of duplication of data
It can handle the large database and rearrange its articles and all according to the requirement.
It can even provide the flexibility to the users to facilitate the necessary information
Systems Requirements
Primary requirements
Few primary requirements are:
Registration: the users let it be member, advertisers or the probable members all need to register their personal details before able to access the system.
Authentication: while registering the system must ask for setting a password, which shall be used for all further visits so that no outsider can enter the system.
Manage database: the entire large database loaded with personal data and articles and advertisements need to be managed efficiently without hanging out. So the system must be able to arrange all data in desired folders and path so that whenever required those can be picked up for publishing according to the subjects.
Arrange on own: it must arrange its database as per the requirement of the newsletter for the ease of users and club president.
Send e-notifications: the system must be such automated that it can send the online notifications to all the users having some pending activity to cover up for the releasing of publication or e-mail registration or some other needs as per future requirement
Manage format: all the formats of releasing newsletter must be kept separately so that as per wish these can be used.
Arrange the format of date according to need: the system must be capable of arranging the date format as per need
Non-functional requirements
Non-functional requirements are:
Secured: the system need to be secured enough for preventing form any outside attack otherwise all the data shall be at stake
Easiest to operate: the operation of the system windows must be user friendly to encourage its maximum use by the users
Accessible and compatible: it is necessary to be accessed from all corners and in all operating systems.
Project Cost Benefit Analysis
This technique is used in all the projects before investing to know how much return and when he return can start generating to measure the benefits against the investment planned (Business Council of Australia, 2012). Below are the few factors like one is total expenditure and the other one the total benefits we can expect, on the basis of which the further development of other factors shall be calculated.
Estimated expenditures
|
Expenses
|
Amount
|
|
Hardware Procurement =
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$ 30,000
|
|
Software development =
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$ 20,000
|
|
Administrative Cost =
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$ 10,000
|
|
Total =
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$ 60,000
|
Estimated expenditure for Maintenance
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Expenses Head
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Cost per Month
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Cost per Year
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|
Maintenance Cost
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$ 1200
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$ 14,400
|
|
Total
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$ 1200
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$ 14,400
|
Estimated benefits
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Benefits
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Profit per Month
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Profit per Year
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|
Reduce the cost of staff
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$ 2000
|
$ 24,000
|
|
Increase the income by
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$ 1000
|
$ 12,000
|
|
Total
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$ 3000
|
$ 36,000
|
Recommendation
After conducting the analysis, the figures obtained are:
The Net Present Value (NPV) of the project is positive with $ 25,043, so is good to invest
The ROI (return on investment) from the project is also positive with 21.46%, so is also good to invest
Then is the pay-back period that is the duration after which we can expect earning profit is 3.48 years.
So, in overall all the obtained figures are so well that the investment is fully advisable.
Work Breakdown Structure is the techniques used to divide the whole scope of work in to manageable work volumes. The last level of the WBS is also called as work package. Once the WBS is ready, then we need to consider it as the skeleton of the project and need to be considered for developing the schedule by putting the activities under each WBS and interlink them to produce a time phased distribution of scope of work called as Gantt chart.
As per the above developed Gantt chart, it can be easily make out that almost all the activities fall in critical path, so all the activities need to look after while executing the project, otherwise there are lot of chances to get schedule overrun. The schedule has a start date of 1st Sep 2017 and end date of 13th Dec 2017.
System Information Requirement Investigation Techniques
List of stakeholders
The project always has some consequences and the project gets impacted by some factors generated by people, so the people affecting or getting effected by the projects are called the stakeholders (Boundless, 2017). Majorly they can be divided in two parts, internal and external. They are:
Internal Stakeholders:
ASC owner
ASC Board Members
ASC President
ASC Members
ASC Staffs
External Stakeholders:
Advertisers
Competitors
Locals
Consultants
Three investigation techniques and usefulness
Three techniques are:
- Judgment by expert: in this technique the panel of experts are engaged together either in a single room or over web, they provide their proposals for the solution or tracking issues with the method of progress.
Usefulness: this is a highly recommended technique and is being used by many organisations, but this ASC being not so big and the budget is also a constraint, in that case thing so many experts may not be advisable but the method of doing the investigation is highly advisable.
- Analysis of Feedback: this is another technique used to investigate the root cause of any problem or to find their way out.
Usefulness: the feedback analysis and then incorporating the same in the system is the way we can deliver the best using Agile methodology, so this approach is highly advisable.
- Personal interview: in this technique a common set of questions being developed by some very good experience expert and then the questions being asked by conducting the interview to get the unbiased feedback.
Usefulness: it is the also advisable, as the expenditure shall not be much but the desired result of the investigation can be found out.
Reflections and Conclusions
Achievements and Constraints:
In the whole report the methodology used is the real achievement and the drawbacks of the methodology like getting diverted from the aim, getting more expenditures and other can be stopped by the use of all the specialised techniques discussed above.
The constraints in the whole system could be the schedule time and budgeted cost, as the methodology I Agile, so chances of getting cost overrun is more and it need to be paid special attention.
Conclusion:
Finally it can be concluded that the methodology selected for developing the system is the best approach what can be done for rectifying the current situation. And the selected investigation techniques are also the brilliant one to counter the drawbacks of the methodology. The schedule and cost need to be paid special attention and the system shall be developed of best standard.
References
AgileMethodology, (2008). The Agile Movement. [Online]. Available at: https://agilemethodology.org/. [Accessed on August 9, 2017].
Boundless. (2017). A stakeholder is an individual or group that has a legitimate interest in a company. [Online]. Available at: https://www.boundless.com/accounting/textbooks/boundless-accounting-textbook/introduction-to-accounting-1/overview-of-key-elements-of-the-business-19/business-stakeholders-internal-and-external-117-6595/. [Accessed on August 9, 2017].
Business Council of Australia. (2012). Cost–Benefit Analysis. [Online]. Available at: https://www.bca.com.au/docs/FFAC5778-2D15-4933-9C29-65FD83338ECC/policy_essentials_cost_benefit_analysis_final_7-9-2012.pdf. [Accessed on August 9, 2017].
