System Design And Development Plan For UNICEF Child Care: Prototyping Methodology Essay.

Proposed Features of the System

Discuss about the Course Planning and Curriculum Design.

UNICEF Child Care is an Australia based organization that provides food, education and residence to the native children. In order to receive their services, the parents of the children needs to register them in the organization and make suitable payments for bearing the costs of their children’s residence at the child care. The main problem with the current system is that all the registration and payment processes are conducted manually (Wasson 2015). Due to the manual processes, there are several issues as well as errors occurring in the system. The issues include no payment invoice provided to the parents, lack of timely inventory update and hence wastage of resources, non-availability of customer care correspondents many of the times and others. Hence, in order to solve these issues and develop more transparency in the system, UNICEF Child Care has decided to initiate a project and develop a new automated system.

In this report, the project has been analysed and a suitable system development plan has been developed along with projected schedule and cost benefit from the project.

Based on the requirements of the system proposed by UNICEF Child Care, the set of objectives of the project is listed as follows.

• To analyse existing issues faced by UNICEF Child Care
• To propose a new system that will solve the identified issues
• To choose a systems development methodology most suited for the proposed information system
• To develop a portal in the system in which users can create personal profiles and manage their accounts including registering their children for service, making payments for their children’s care and others
• To redesign the customer care system in order to make it more responsive to the customers’ calls
• To complete the entire project within the pre set deadline and budget

Systems Development Approach is a chosen development method that is applicable for the gradual development of a system. Some of the most popular systems development methods include Agile, Waterfall, Prototyping, RAD (Rapid Application Development) and others. Generally, a particular approach is selected based on the requirements of the system (Richey and Klein 2014). For instance, when the system requires only one particular feature, RAD may be selected whereas a system with a number of different systems requires prototyping approach.

Before selecting a systems development approach, the requirements of the proposed system are analysed as follows.

New Automated Customer Care – One of the main problems faced by UNICEF is that the customer care personnel are not present in their workstations 24 hours. As a result, they often miss some important calls made by the customers. Furthermore, during high influx of customer calls, it is not possible for a customer care person to attend multiple calls at the same time (Vezzoli et al. 2015). Hence, in the new system, it has been proposed to develop an online chat system where the customers can directly interact with the customer support through text messages. Furthermore, if the customer care personnel are not present at a certain time, the customers will be able to send an email to the customer care, which will be duly followed up and addressed at the earliest.

Selected Systems Development Methodology

User Profile and Business Portal – In order to develop the online chat system as well as the other proposed features, a new business portal needs to be created. This portal will be accessible by both UNICEF and the customers. The customers will be able to create their own profiles in the portal and will be able to perform a host of activities including chat with customer care, make payments for their children’s expenses, download payment invoices and others.

Automated Order for Supplies – Wastage of supplies is a common problem for UNICEF due to lack of proper update of inventory. In the current system, there is no automated update system and based on estimations only, the bulk orders are sent to the suppliers after each admission season. As a result, there is often of food as well as resources if the admission count does not reach the estimated amount (Laudon and Laudon 2016). The proposed system will be able to send orders to the suppliers automatically when new registrations are done. After a certain interval of time, number of new registrations will be calculated and then the order will be sent automatically. This process will prevent the wastage of supplies, resources and also time.

In order to implement all these features within one system, the most suitable systems development method will be prototyping. The advantages of the use of prototyping in this system development are as follows.

1. Prototyping will allow the developer to develop the system prototype and test it to determine all the installed features work together successfully or not.
2. If other systems development methods like agile or waterfall are used, they will consume a huge amount of time for the completion of development of the proposed system consisting of all the features (Valacich, George and Hoffer 2014). This will also significantly increase the cost and time needed for the project.

There are a number of functional and non-functional requirements of the project that must be fulfilled at the end of the project. These requirements are listed in the following table.

Project cost benefit analysis is a process by which the estimated profit margin gained as a result of the project executed is determined. The cost benefit is generally determined by calculating average annual expenses as well as expecting amounts of profits that can be gathered from the system (Schwalbe 2015). For this project, the cost benefit analysis results are shown in the following tables.

Table 1: Cost Analysis Inputs

The above two images represent the Gantt chart and work breakdown structure of the project. While the Gantt chart represents the estimated time schedule of the project, the work breakdown structure represents all the work packages of the project arranged in specific pattern and in the respective work phases (Harrison and Lock 2017). The relationship between the two is that work breakdown structure can be used to develop the project schedule as shown in the Gantt chart.

Cost-Benefit Analysis

The identified list of stakeholders is provided in the following table.

System investigation techniques are deployed by an organization to receive feedbacks and determine whether the newly developed and implemented system is running as per the requirements and whether there are errors in the system. Some of the common investigation techniques that can be utilized by UNICEF for system investigation are as follows.

Direct Monitoring – This is to be accomplished by monitoring the activities of the employees working on the newly developed system. By direct monitoring, the issues can be identified easily and then suitable feedbacks will be requested from the employees.

Questionnaire Survey / Interview – An alternative to the monitoring process is the questionnaire / interview process in which, the employees are first asked to work on the system and identify the problems and issues (Eason 2014). Then a questionnaire survey or personal interview is conducted to gather the feedbacks from the employees regarding the issues.

Documentation Analysis – Finally, the last recommended technique is to analyse the project documentation prepared throughout the course of the project. Sometimes, the errors can be identified from the document itself and if the case is so, suitable measures must be taken to address the errors immediately.

There are also other available investigation methods but these three have been chosen as they are the most suitable for the company owing its size and system requirements (Sligo et al. 2017). For the newly proposed system, these chosen system investigation techniques can be very effective for data collection and analysis for addressing the problems and issues.

Conclusions

This project has been instrumental in my learning of project management and system analysis and design. I have learnt to identify the issues that need to be addressed through a project and develop a project plan accordingly. I have also learnt about choosing a particular system development methodology that is most suitable for a particular project.

In this project report, a system design and development plan has been developed for UNICEF Child Care. For meeting the requirements of the project, prototyping method has been selected and accordingly, a suitable timeline and cost benefit analysis have been provided. Furthermore, three system investigation techniques have been suggested for future management of the newly developed system.

References

Buede, D.M. and Miller, W.D., 2016. The engineering design of systems: models and methods. John Wiley & Sons.

Coronel, C. and Morris, S., 2016. Database systems: design, implementation, & management. Cengage Learning.

Eason, K.D., 2014. Information technology and organisational change. CRC Press.

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

Laudon, K.C. and Laudon, J.P., 2016. Management information system. Pearson Education India.

Power, D.J., Sharda, R. and Burstein, F., 2015. Decision support systems. John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Richey, R.C. and Klein, J.D., 2014. Design and development research. In Handbook of research on educational communications and technology (pp. 141-150). Springer, New York, NY.

Romiszowski, A.J., 2016. Designing instructional systems: Decision making in course planning and curriculum design. Routledge.

Schwalbe, K., 2015. Information technology project management. Cengage Learning.

Sligo, J., Gauld, R., Roberts, V. and Villa, L., 2017. A literature review for large-scale health information system project planning, implementation and evaluation. International journal of medical informatics, 97, pp.86-97.

Valacich, J., George, J. and Hoffer, J., 2014. Essentials of systems analysis and design. Prentice Hall Press.

Vezzoli, C., Ceschin, F. and Diehl, J.C., 2015. Sustainable Product-Service System Design applied to Distributed Renewable Energy fostering the goal of sustainable energy for all. Journal of Cleaner Production, 97, pp.134-136.
Wasson, C.S., 2015. System engineering analysis, design, and development: Concepts, principles, and practices. John Wiley & Sons.