Automating Student Enrollment Process And Support Activities - Victoria University

What is system development approach was used (agile or other traditional approaches) for your project and why this approach is used?
What are the functional requirements? Data requirement description, including either structured paradigm (ER diagram, Data Flow Diagram, etc…) or object oriented paradigm (UML diagram, etc…). Define all the data (Data Types and Sizes) in your database
Overall use case diagram and detail description and explanation of each use case.
What are non-functional requirements for the proposed system? Such as Look and Feel Requirements, Usability and Humanity Requirements, Performance Requirements, Operational Requirements, Maintainability and Support Requirements, Security Requirements, Cultural and Political Requirements, Legal Requirements, etc..
System navigation and user interface design, including sketches, screenshot or storyboard.
Analyse and estimate the associated cost of the project.

Show a work breakdown structure and a project schedule (as a Gantt Chart). Explain and the schedule and discus how they relate to the current project.
Any issue needs consideration such as risks, cutover, over budget, new problems, etc…. Provide your explanation of the issues and justification of possible solution.
A table showing detailed information about the contribution for each member to the System Analysis and design stage should be provided. Members of the same group may receive different marks depending on the contribution to the project. (Student may be interviewed to demonstrate their understanding about the part which they contributed)
At least 12 references must be used, including 6 scholarly references. (Harvard Referencing Style)
If you are working on an existing project provided in VU Collaborate. Critical Analysis on the limitation existing system should be provided. Details on the improvement and upgrade of your newsystem should be clearly clarified. 

The Victoria University ICT department is crucial in ensuring student’s affairs activities in the university runs smoothly. It is responsible for acquisition, distribution and maintenance of student’s affairs related resources (Paz, and Pow-Sang, 2016). It also provides user support and network support across the university. The University has automated all its services from learning to charging and discharge of students. This studies narrows down its scope to activities that takes place around the student’s affairs department.

Operations

During acquisition of resources for the students acquired are received and recorded for management purposes. They are then distributed to the University users upon demand. During distribution details of the resource given, users acquiring to use the device and as to the location of the University the resource is being taken to is recorded. This is in order to keep track of students enrolled. Once the equipment are distributed, their maintenance is followed up to ensure each student’s condition is known. Faculties and other student’s oriented services are reported to the student’s affairs workshop which is responsible for serving the students. The details of the students are recorded and status as on serving kept whenever the administration receives a student’s issue. Upon completion of tackling an issue the responses are returned to the students.

Operations

As for user support, the student’s affairs department has a helpdesk where students can report their challenges in their interaction with the administration and can receive rapid response to fix their issues. A student’s affairs officer is assigned to a service desk to receive student’s cases, complains and requests related to enrollment. Upon receiving a given case, the officer records the nature of the case, name of the caller, the extension number used and the department the caller calls from. He in turns records the details again on a job card that is given to an officer available to be accompanied to the field who resolves the problem. Upon resolving the student signs to confirm satisfaction. Issues reported and resolved per day are then recorded on a spreadsheet for storage.

For network support the ICT department is in charge. Issues to do with network layout, switch installation and configuration, cabling, network troubleshooting, network devices replacement are reported here. Just like the helpdesk, there is a service desk where a case is reported through a call. Details concerning the student, location and issue itself are recorded.  An available officer is then sent to the field with a job card to resolve the problem. Once an enrollment issue is resolved it is recorded and the data transferred to a spreadsheet.

Purpose, Scope, Objective and Exclusion of the Project

Problem Statement(s):

The student’s enrollment activities are effected manually. This includes registration and orientation. User support and networking activities and tasks assigned to resolve issues affecting the enrollment process are all captured manually. This makes it hard to make effective decisions based on data collected from this areas as report generation is tedious and takes a lot of time to come to conclusions (Pecchia, et al., 2015).

User Support

Student’s satisfaction becomes hard to achieve. Accountability is an issue in this system which results to poor of quality service provided (Bergman, 2004). Therefore to improve the department’s services and management there is need to automate the management of records and information as well as the support and network activities which will ensure customer satisfaction is achieved effectively.

Objectives

The project aims develop a web system that automates the student enrollment process of the records and information on the equipment as well as improve the efficiency of the support center. The following are the projects objectives:

1. To develop a system that will produce reports when needed and in the correct format.
2. To develop a system that will keep track of all the processes taking place during enrollment.

• To develop a system that will ensure accountability and responsibility by recording officers against tasks assigned during student’s enrollment period.

Scope and limitation

The scope of this project work covers the design and implementation of a Web based ICT activities and helpdesk system. It will assist in enrollment, distribution of resources as well as produce an inventory that aids to effectively manage records and university resources (Benner, et al., 2014). Thus it will capture the student’s details, numbers and inventory of university resources and the helpdesk activities concerning student’s support and network support.

This project research is limited to the management of records and information by the student enrollment department as well as ICT helpdesk activities coverage (Edgington, 2010). The system will be coded in PHP scripting language as it can run on many platforms and can also integrate with numerous devices.

Assumption, Constraint, Deliverable, Schedule, Budget, Resources, Roles and Responsibility

Deliverable

The project aims to develop a web system that automates the student enrollment department, management of the records and information regarding students as well as improve the efficiency of the support center by enhancing responsibility and accountability on the part of university staffs (Wanke, 2011). The system should generate reports on demand on tasks done, most reported cases and on student enrollment to help management to make decisions on service delivery and on improving customer service.

Justification

For the purpose of Automated Student Enrollment, proper management decision making, analysis and even maintenance of various devices, the department need to find and embrace proper strategies and effective way to automate their system in order to deal with earlier mentioned challenges (Barrett, et al., 2006).

Resources, roles and responsibility

The system is user friendly, enabling the enrollment officers to login easily for the purpose of management and to enhance accountability. This as result improves the quality of service provided. It provides several modules: to display an inventory of equipment in the University in use within a given time and to record and distribute university resources to the students (Jäntti, 2012). In addition to this the officer can sort the students and generate a report useful for managerial purposes.
The system speeds up decision making by providing necessary useful reports as requested.

Proposed Project Budget

Gantt chart

Bergman, B. &. K. B., 2004. Quality from Customer Needs to Customer Satisfaction. Lund: Studentlitteratur.

Edgington, T. M. R. T. &. V. A. S., 2010. Using process mining to identify coordination patterns in IT service management. Decision Support Systems, Vol 49, pp. 175-186.

Iden, J. &. E. T. R., 2013. Implementing IT Service Management. International Journal of Information management, pp. 1-12.

informatik, 2010. The Complex Method SSADM. 

Jäntti, M., 2012. Improving IT Service Desk and Service Management Process in Finnish Tax Administration. Berlin: Springer Berlin Heidelberg.

Wanke, P., 2011. Gestão de estoques na cadeia de suprimentos. São Paulo: Atlas.

Barrett, S., Higgins, C., Twomey, C. and Evans, M., Wilde Tech Ltd, 2006. Software development process. U.S. Patent 7,000,219.

Benner, K.M., Feather, M.S., Johnson, W.L. and Zorman, L.A., 2014. Utilizing scenarios in the software development process. Information system development process, 30, pp.117-134.

Pecchia, A., Cinque, M., Carrozza, G. and Cotroneo, D., 2015, May. Industry practices and event logging: assessment of a critical software development process. In Proceedings of the 37th International Conference on Software Engineering-Volume 2 (pp. 169-178). IEEE Press.

Paz, F. and Pow-Sang, J.A., 2016. A systematic mapping review of usability evaluation methods for software development process. International Journal of Software Engineering and Its Applications, 10(1), pp.165-178.