Influence Of Online Social Networks On UNICEF Child Care: An Essay.

Discuss about the Influence of Online Social Networks.

UNICEF Child Care is an organization that provides caring and supervision services to children of ages between six and thirteen. For enrolling in their services, the parents of the children need to register their names in the company office and make payments for bearing the expenses of food, toys and residence of their children (Zaglia et al. 2015). However, UNICEF has noticed that this process has a number of issues and problems that is affecting the entire business structure of the company. While some issues are due to manual processing, others are mainly due to lack of proper operation structure that need to be addressed.

UNICEF has proposed the development of a new information system including a company business portal that will be able to solve the identified problems at once.

The development of the proposed system will require a particular development method that should include a well defined development life cycle. Some of the possible systems development methods include agile, waterfall or prototyping. Analysing the requirement of this system, the best method for the development will be Prototyping. The systems development life cycle will be as follows.

Initiation – In this phase of the life cycle, the development of the prototype will be initiated. This phase includes preparation of requirement document, collection of resources, planning and others.

Prototyping – This is the main phase of the development life cycle that can be repeated more than once unless the desired outcome is reached (Bimonte et al. 2017). This phase contains a number of sub-phases including requirement gathering, developing and testing.

Production – Finally, in this phase, the complete version is developed from the prototype and delivered to the project client.

Among all the different development methodologies, prototyping method has been chosen because in this project, the prototype of the system will be first developed and tested. Based on the test results and completion of the entire prototype, the full version will be developed and handed over to UNICEF.

Business Portal – A business portal is required where the clients of the organization i.e. the parents of the children will be able to create personal profiles through which they will be able to perform business interactions with UNICEF (Fan and Yang 2015). For instance, while making payments for their children, they will have an online payment option in the portal. Through this gateway, they will be able to pay UNICEF for bearing the costs of their children.

Systems Requirements

Automated Supply Order – The business portal of the company will have to option to place orders for supplies once in a while. As per the proposed plan, at the end of a period of 7 days, the number of new requests will be counted and order will be placed automatically by the system.

Payment Gateway Client – Generally, payment gateways are provided by different organizations for safe transfer of money from the sender to the recipient (Sugianto and Tojib 2015). For the business portal of UNICEF, a suitable client will be needed who will provide a secure payment gateway.

Accessibility Requirement – The portal should be developed such that it will be accessible through different web browsers and devices.

Project cost benefit analysis is done in order to estimate a possible range of profit to be gained from the project as well as the percentage of benefit gained from these profits in terms of the expenses faced in the course of the project.

Gantt chart is an important tool in determining the schedule of a project based on the requirements. On the other hand, a work breakdown structure is generally utilized to break down the work packages for simplifying the overall phases of the project. A work breakdown structure of a project is generally developed from the list of deliverables and it also links various work packages that lie under the same project phase. A work breakdown structure can also be used to develop the Gantt chart for determining an estimated timeline for the project.

Table 2: Project Schedule

In order to determine the stakeholders of the project, the following table has been developed.

System investigation techniques will be deployed in order to identify faults and errors in the existing system and address them in due course. Some of the investigation techniques to be deployed in this project are as follows.

Survey (Online or Paper Questionnaires) – This method can be utilized to gain user feedbacks regarding the use of the system. In these questionnaires, there will be a series of questions with a fixed set of answers that will be chosen by the participants.

Personal Interview – This is another efficient investigation method and it provides a better dataset as there are no limited sets of answers (Joslin and Müller 2015). The participants can provide any feedback to the interviewer regarding the working of the system.

Document Analysis – This process is done by studying the system details document developed throughout the course of the project. This document can provide some necessary data sets regarding faults and errors in the system.

Project Cost Benefit Analysis

In this project, I have gathered significant amount of knowledge regarding system design and development. I also learnt to plan a project as well as develop suitable parameters of the project like project schedule and cost benefit analysis. Finally, I learnt the use of work breakdown structure as a tool for determining and linking various work packages in the project.

This report is finally concluded by stating that a suitable project plan has been developed for the project based on the feasibility limits of time and budget. A systems development methodology has also been chosen for the development of the system proposed by UNICEF.

References

Bimonte, S., Sautot, L., Journaux, L. and Faivre, B., 2017. Multidimensional model design using data mining: A rapid prototyping methodology. International Journal of Data Warehousing and Mining (IJDWM), 13(1), pp.1-35.

el Khaldi, F., Ahouangonou, C., Niess, M. and David, O., 2016. Cloud based hpc for innovative virtual prototyping methodology: Automotive applications. Transportation Research Procedia, 14, pp.993-1002.

Fan, J. and Yang, W., 2015. Study on e-government services quality: The integration of online and offline services. Journal of Industrial Engineering and Management, 8(3), p.693.

Joslin, R. and Müller, R., 2015. Relationships between a project management methodology and project success in different project governance contexts. International Journal of Project Management, 33(6),pp.1377-1392.
Kerzner, H. and Kerzner, H.R., 2017. Project management: a systems approach to planning, scheduling, and controlling. John Wiley & Sons.

Mancuso, V., Vitale, C., Gupta, R., Rathi, K. and Morelli, A., 2014. A prototyping methodology for SDN-controlled LTE using SDR.

Prashar, S., Vijay, T.S. and Parsad, C., 2015. Antecedents to online shopping: Factors influencing the selection of web portal. International Journal of E-Business Research (IJEBR), 11(1), pp.35-55.

Sautot, L., Bimonte, S., Journaux, L. and Faivre, B., 2014, September. A methodology and tool for rapid prototyping of data warehouses using data mining: Application to birds biodiversity. In International Conference on Model and Data Engineering (pp. 250-257). Springer, Cham.

Sugianto, L.F. and Tojib, D.R., 2015. Modelling user satisfaction with an employee portal. International Journal of Business and Information, 1(2).

Svejvig, P. and Andersen, P., 2015. Rethinking project management: A structured literature review with a critical look at the brave new world. International Journal of Project Management, 33(2), pp.278-290.

Turner, R., 2016. Gower handbook of project management. Routledge.

Zaglia, M.E., Waiguny, M.K., Abfalter, D. and Müller, J., 2015. The influence of online social networks on performance of small and medium enterprises: An empirical investigation of the online business to business network XING. International Journal of Entrepreneurial Venturing, 7(1), pp.1-23.