Criticality And Propagation Analysis Of Impacts In UNICEF Child Care (UCG) Essay.

Discuss about the Criticality And Propagation Analysis Of Impacts.

This report deals with the case of UNICEF Child Care (UCG) which provides support, supervision and care to children between the ages of six weeks to 13 years. The children care has been facing issues due to the current manual process of donations and ordering of supplies. These processes are inefficient and the report will develop an accurate system which will reduce their cost of operation.

According to Kerzner and Kerzner, (2017), the essential requirements of the project are included in the project statement. This will be developed based on the requirements of the organization and goals of the stakeholders. In this current project, an online deposit system will be designed and developed so that the donors can conveniently transfer funds with ease. It will also comprise of development of an ordering system for managing inventory efficiently to reduce the wastage of resources.

Harrison and Lock, (2017) states, the project objective constitute the objectives and the desired outcomes based on the goals of the stakeholders. The objectives of the current project are as follows:

• To conduct research to identify the specifications of  the new system
• To discuss with the project members about the specification of the new system
• To develop the new online deposit and ordering system
• To integrate the system into the current organizational model
• To test the new system to identify required customization
• To implement the changes and revamp the system.

As opined by Jaber, et al., (2018), the inputs processes in achieving the goals of the project are in accordance with the stakeholder objective is known as deliverables.  The different components of projects are information plan, money, hardware, process documents and software. The deliverables in the current project are as follows:

As stated by Montoya and Persson, (2017), there are tasks on the project schedule that have a timeframe of zero days, which do not have any impact on the overall timeframe of the work are known as project milestones. These phases are known as milestones which signify the completion of different phases in the project. The progress of the project can be identified using the milestone. The completion of each milestone represents the completion of each of the phases. The milestones in this project are as follows:

UNICEF Child Care has identified the different issues faced by the organization. The system will be developed by the problems such as; supply wastage, inability of getting a  proper statement at the year end and staff’s inability to answer calls and emails from the parents most of the times.

In this current study, waterfall/gated approach have been used as the project has been defined in a well defined manner. Moreover, the risk involved in this process and the feedback cycles used all through the life cycle are minimal (Valacich, George & Hoffer, 2014). This approach will require a sign off after completion of each of the phases consisting of designing, development, analysis, requirements, implementation, testing and maintenance.  This approach uses the Big Bang deployment which means that the whole project gets live at once.

 As put forward by Fleming and Koppelman, (2016), requirements are the essentials in the project required for successfully executing the project. The system requirements are as follow:

Primary functional requirements

• Online deposit system for parents which will send an automated generated mail to them after their transactions.
• The clients will be provided with login ID where the data of each of their transaction will be stored.
• The system of ordering supplies will have to be automated which will be able to manage stocks in a better way.

Non functional requirements

• Usability of the frequently used functions will have to be tested multiple times. The critical and the complex functions will also have to be analyzed.
• Reliability of the new system has to be high by keeping the mean time between failures as long as possible.  The system should also consist of requirements which will ease the monitoring of the system.
• Performance  of the system have to be kept high so system response times and peak times have to be identified to identify the load on the system during the periods of stress.
• Supportability of the system has to be checked so that the new system is cost effective.

The cost benefit analysis is used to understand the benefit of the project in terms of cost in future prospective.  In this current study, the given discount rate is and appraisal period has been taken as 8years which shows that with each passing year the system will provide considerable profit to the organization. The benefit cost ratio highlights that the benefit achieved in the coming 8 years will be much more than the overall cost of the system in the next 8 years.

Table 1: Cost Benefit Analysis

Table 2: Project Schedule

The system information requirement investigation techniques used in the project are surveys and interviews, reviewing existing similar systems, developing prototypes and conducting sessions for joint application design (Laudon & Laudon, 2016). These processes will be used to investigate the requirements and the different ways it can be mitigated.

Reflections and Conclusions

This report has been able to develop a successful project plan with a costs benefit analysis which shows that the project will be highly beneficial for the organization.  The project schedule shows most of the tasks are critical tasks and changes can only brought to the non critical tasks.  Thus, it can be concluded that if the project requirements are followed as per the plan, the organization will benefit from installing the new system.

References 

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

Harrison, F., & Lock, D. (2017). Advanced project management: a structured approach. Routledge.

Jaber, H., Marle, F., Vidal, L. A., & Didiez, L. (2018). Criticality and propagation analysis of impacts between project deliverables. Research in Engineering Design, 29(1), 87-106.

Kerzner, H., & Kerzner, H. R. (2017). Project management: a systems approach to planning, scheduling, and controlling. John Wiley & Sons.

Laudon, K. C., & Laudon, J. P. (2016). Management information system. Pearson Education India.

Montoya, J. H., & Persson, K. A. (2017, April). The Materials Project: Milestones, Challenges, and Opportunities in High-Throughput Computational Materials Science. In Meeting Abstracts (No. 35, pp. 1666-1666). The Electrochemical Society.

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