Development Of An Information System For International Charity Foundation Essay.

Sponsors go online to the websites and look up bank details of ICF. They then go and make a payment via bank transfer to the ICF trust account. Some individuals chose to go to a branch and deposit money directly into the ICF account. After that the sponsors either call or email ICF to leave their details to get a receipt. Because of the OAGDS, ICF can issue tax-deductible receipts for donations to their overseas aid activities. Once the funds are received at the end of each week the accountant generate receipts manually for each individuals and organizations, and then either send to them via emails or Australia post

Each week, supplies such as food, medicine, medical equipment, etc.…are ordered by the admin staffs of ICF at the central office in Australia. Prior to ordering the supplies, the admin staffs in Australia rings around each branch to determine the existing stock levels and estimated number of supplies required each week. The stock level is mainly kept track of using paper based documents, which could be out of date at the time of query. Information about expense on medical treatment and other operations are kept on excel files in computers at the local offices.

Problems with the Current System

1. Many admin staffs are required to manually process application forms and enrolling students to appropriate programs.
2. Staff must be always available to answer phone calls and emails from sponsors to note their details for creating receipts.
3. Wastage of supplies or lack of supplies often happens at different branches due to inaccurate stock levels.
4. Statement on income (from donations) and expense could not be monitored effectively, and there is some duplication between paper and excel records.

Sponsors' Payment Process

International Charity Foundation (ICF) is an Australia based international organization that supports young children’s education and medical treatments if they have limited resources or unable to gather sufficient funds for travelling abroad. ICF collects funds from various sponsors and provide them to the children who have enrolled for specific programs. In spite of being a popular initiative and receiving significant amount of funds from the sponsors every year, the organization is facing certain problems regarding the operations. The problems included manual handling of documents and payments resulting in numerous and considerable errors and the use of paper documents that can be easily destroyed. Hence, the organization has decided to implement a computerized system that will be much more efficient, faster and with minimized errors.

The aim of this report is to determine a specific and suitable system development methodology for the development of the proposed information system for ICF.

There are several system development approaches and methods that are chosen based on the nature and type of project and the project requirements. This particular project requires the development of a number of different features within a limited period of time. Hence, the recommended approach to systems development is rapid prototyping (Špundak 2014). In this approach, the different features of the system will be treated as separate projects but will also executed at the same time. After completion, the features will be integrated within one common system.

There are several functional and non-functional requirements of the system that are required for the development of the information system.

The functional requirements include sufficient hardware to support the information system, online registration portal, stock update and others (Laudon and Laudon 2016).

Hardware: The role of this functional requirement is to provide a platform on which the entire system will run, process and store valuable information. Without sufficiently upgraded hardware, it will not be possible to run the entire system with all the proposed features.

Online Registration Portal: This functional requirement is required to allow the user to create a personal profile through which he can make payments, view services, register for modules / services and others.

Stock Update: This requirement includes updating the stock on a frequent basis so that the resources are not wasted or there are no shortages of resources. Preferably on a weekly basis, the stock will be updated so that in case of excess resources, purchase of more resources will be closed and in case of shortage, orders will be sent to the vendor for providing resource supplies.

Weekly Supplies Ordering Process

The non-functional requirements include regular inventory upgrades, online customer chat system with fast response, access to online registration form and others. These non functional requirements of the project are the backbones of the functional requirements and are used to provide support to the entire system developed in the project.

Project cost benefit analysis is performed in order to determine an estimated range of monetary benefits that can be earned after a certain period of time post project completion. During the planning phase, a budget is estimated for the project and to provide such a budget, the organization needs to procure funds on loan from various sources / sponsors or can invest in the project from its own funds. However, from every project, the organization needs to earn back the investment as quick as possible along with a health margin of profit. Cost benefit analysis also helps the organization to determine whether the project is financially feasible or not.

The cost benefit analysis for the project is done as follows.

A work breakdown structure is a list of various work packages in a project arranged under respective project deliverables and placed in a particular chronological order as per the requirements of the project. The work breakdown structure enables the project manager to determine the priorities of work packages as well as various linkages with different work packages.

Gantt chart is the diagrammatic representation of the scheduled work packages of a particular project after an overall time is estimated for the project. Hence, it is evident that the Gantt chart is directly developed from the work breakdown structure after the work packages are arranged in a particular order.

As estimated in the Gantt chart, the estimated time required for the project is around 90 days, which is reasonable enough owing to the nature and the scale of the project. Also, the budget consumed within this period is feasible for the organization and hence, it can proceed with the project.

There are a number of stakeholders involved in the project who all have different and specific roles to play in the project. Some of the main stakeholders involved in the project are project manager, finance manager, developer and tester. The project manager is responsible for managing and controlling the entire project while also taking part in change management, monitoring of the project progress and others. Without his approval, none of the major decisions or requests made during the project will be allowed to be implemented or executed. The finance manager is mainly involved in managing the financial aspect of the project including managing budget, allocating funds within stakeholder groups, assessing additional fund request documents and others.

Problems with the Current System

System information requirement investigation techniques are those which are used to extract from necessary information from the system including maintenance status, working status, issues and others (Serrador and Pinto 2015). This is important in order to keep track of the system and solve any issues that might be faced by the employees working in the system. It is also important to monitor the systems in order to ensure no illegal work is done in them.

Some common investigation techniques used are questionnaire based survey, direct monitoring and analysis of daily update reports / documents.

Survey: This technique is executed by conducting a detailed survey of all the employees working in the organization. After the implementation of the new system, the employees have the first hand experiences in working with the newly developed systems. Based on their personal experiences, they can participate in the survey and can freely provide information regarding issues and problems faced in the system.

Monitoring: Monitoring is another reliable technique that can be utilized for determining issues in the system.

Analysis of Reports: The investigation can also be conducted based on the analysis of various progress reports and project logs from which the errors can be detected.

Conclusions

This project involves development of an information system for ICF that will have to include several features like online registration system, printing of online receipts for the sponsors, regular inventory update, 24 hours customer chat system, secure payment gateway for the sponsors and others. The project is estimated to be completed in 91 days and the pre set budget to be used in the project is $250,000.

This project helped me a lot in understanding a large number of concepts and subjects that include project management, systems development methodology, system information investigation technique and others. I also learnt several techniques like determination of appropriate project development method, scheduling of project, determination of budget of project and also the analysis of cost benefit from the project.

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