System Analysis And Design For Management Report

Groups for Requirements Analysis

Describe about the System Analysis and Design for Management Report.

The report is developed for the Mexican food store that is looking forward to start its business in Sunshine Coast and expand in the area by working under franchise agreement for all the future stores. Inventory and order management systems will be implemented and linked for all the stores and wireless access points will also be required in every store for the functioning of all the activities. The report covers the requirement analysis and sources to understand the specifications of the system. It also covers the concept of scalability and its significance in this particular project.

Business Owner and his team

The most important entity involved in the project is the business owner, Mr. El Paso and his team. It will be important to understand his demands and requirements from the system along with the non-functional aspects he is willing to be considered. There are also other factors such as project budget and schedule which can be best covered from this source of requirements.

These people will assist in understanding of the requirements from the business perspective in terms of the competition in the market, trends in the inventory and order management systems and also the expansion schedule that must be followed. The margins and acceptance criteria can also be devised after interacting with this group.

Every store requires a network connectivity and wireless access points. These will require network set up and architecture along with the networking equipment. The cost and layout associated with the same will be assessed on the basis of the response received from the interaction with this group.

Apart from the infrastructural requirements, there will also be a number of technical requirements associated with the system in terms of inventory management, order processing and management, front end, back end and many other components. The same will be explained by a team of technical experts that will be consulted to gain better clarity on the requirements.

The primary objective of any project or system is to satisfy the customer that will be utilizing the same. Hence, the customers will also be involved in the analysis process and their needs and expectations will be documented.

There are a number of methods that can be utilized for discovering the requirements that are associated with the Mexican food store and its launch. The first method includes elicitation of requirements with the help of measures such as identification of data sources, interviewing the key entities and stakeholders and gathering all of the information together at one place (Wiley, 2016).

Methods for Discovering Requirements

There are a number of requirements trawling techniques that can be used to identify the requirements associated with the system. Abstraction can be used which makes use of the concept of generalization to reach to a set of requirements. There can also be other trawling techniques that can be applied such as mind mapping, brainstorming, simulation modeling and prototyping. These techniques will involve carrying out a model based approach or interacting with various user groups to come up to viable and conclusive information (Robertson, 2001).

Fact finding is another technique that can be applied to understand and discover the requirements that are associated with the system. The system analysts can adapt this technique through a number of methods that are defined under the same. The stakeholders that are associated with the system can be interviewed with the aim to come up with facts and explanations at the end of the process (Ukessays, 2016). Questionnaires can also be created and distributed to all the associated parties and their response must be collected to understand the expectations and specifications of the system. This technique will allow the analysts to classify the requirements that are discovered in a number of different categories as functional, non-functional, business, and user. There will also be some sort of data that will be available with the store owner and his team. This data may include the flow charts or business idea or any other information that may be utilized by the analysts to discover the requirements and understand the system in a better manner (Anvari, 2016).

Market study can also be carried out to understand the basic expectations of the customers and the business units from the store and its services. It will also provide a glimpse on the latest trends and technology that is being adapted in the market.

Scalability is defined as the ability of the system to be at par with the business and user requirements at all times. It is the capability of a system to be scaled up or scaled down as per the requirement and scenario without affecting the existing functionalities and services (Msdn, 2016).

There are a number of components that are associated with a particular system such as hardware, software, network and infrastructure. Technology is something that is changing at a rapid pace and a concept that is considered to be in trend at a point of time may soon become obsolete. It is thus essential for the system analysts, designers and developers to come up with a system that is scalable in nature and can be scaled easily as per the changes in the requirements (Jia, 2016).

System Scalability

Scalability is the one of the prime requirements of the system that will be implemented for the Mexican food store and the reasons for the same are as explained below.

The food store is already looking forward to expand the business under franchise agreements for future stores. The system that is created for one store will then be required to be implemented across all the units. Re-designing a new system for every new store will be troublesome for the staff and will also include a great share of costs. The scalability of the system will play a significant role in this case. The system will be implemented across all the stores in terms of the network, information systems and data.

Inventory management, order processing and management and data management are the key features and components that will be implemented in the system being developed for the Mexican food store. All of these features will have automated functionalities and the same will be implemented across the network with a front end or back end. The technology that will be utilized in the development and implementation of the components may become obsolete after a few months or years. Re-developing the system from scratch would not be a great idea in such a case and the scalability of the system will again play a significant role in this case. There must always be a scope in the system to be scaled up or down and the same can then be utilized to transfer the technology and upgrade the system. The same would then be easily implemented across all the stores.

The data stores that will be utilized for the data management will incorporate more and more data with the increase in number of stores and number of customers. The scalability of these data stores will allow the food store to handle large amounts of data with ease in terms of data storage and data operations (Ahirrao and Ingle, 2015).

The number of customers associated with the stores will also increase with the expansion of business from one outlet to multiple outlets. Also, with the presence of stores in the market and provision of good quality products at increased time period will attract more and more customers. It will then be essential for the network bandwidth and the information systems that are implemented to handle thousand of requests and queries simultaneously. The initial set of network bandwidth and system capabilities will no longer be enough to handle the huge number of users. Setting up of the network architecture all over again and re-designing of the system capabilities would not only be expensive but will also hamper the existing functionalities and services. System scalability will then be utilized to enhance the system capabilities and network limits to incorporate the estimated number of users and their requests (Kermarrec and Taïani, 2015).

There may also be scenarios wherein it would be necessary to scale down the system in terms of the capabilities or the network requirements. For instance, there may be a particular food store set up in a region that fails to attract huge number of customers but maintains a fixed customer base on a monthly basis. It would not be recommended to completely shut down the store and it would not be wise to exhaust huge network and system capabilities in the same. In such a scenario, the system associated with that particular store can be scaled down as per the scenario and can be again scaled up if required.

References

Ahirrao, S. and Ingle, R. (2015). Scalable transactions in cloud data stores. Journal of Cloud Computing, 4(1).

Anvari, (2016). Fact-Finding Techniques for Requirements Discovery. [online] Available at: https://www.anvari.net/CIS210%5CCIS210Spring08%5CInstructors%20Manual/Chap06.pdf [Accessed 14 Sep. 2016].

Jia, X. (2016). » Scalable Information Systems ICST: Institute for Computer Sciences, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering. [online] Icst.org. Available at: https://icst.org/scalable-information-systems/ [Accessed 14 Sep. 2016].

Kermarrec, A. and Taïani, F. (2015). Want to scale in centralized systems? Think P2P. J Internet Serv Appl, 6(1).

Msdn, (2016). What Is Scalability?. [online] Msdn.microsoft.com. Available at: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa578023.aspx [Accessed 14 Sep. 2016].

Robertson, S. (2001). Requirements trawling: techniques for discovering requirements. International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, 55(4), pp.405-421.

Ukessays, (2016). Definition Of Fact Finding Techniques Information Technology Essay. [online] Available at: https://www.ukessays.com/essays/information-technology/definition-of-fact-finding-techniques-information-technology-essay.php [Accessed 14 Sep. 2016].

Wiley, (2016). Wiley: Discovering Requirements: How to Specify Products and Services – Ian F. Alexander, Ljerka Beus-Dukic. [online] As.wiley.com. Available at: https://as.wiley.com/WileyCDA/WileyTitle/productCd-0470712406.html [Accessed 14 Sep. 2016].