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.
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.
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.
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.
|
Functional Requirement |
Feature / Function |
Non-Functional Requirement |
Feature / Function |
|
User Profile |
Personal profile for users, option to make online payment and download digital invoice |
Central Database Server |
Store and manage customer data, profile, payment records, etc. |
|
Customer Chat System |
Ability of the customer care person to handle multiple customers at the same time, offline query support |
Secure Payment System |
Security for customer information and details during online payments |
|
Automated Order |
Automatic ordering of supplies based on number of registrations |
Accessibility |
Accessibility from different devices and web browsers |
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.
|
Cost Benefit Analysis for UNICEF Child Care |
|
|
Hardware |
$ 50,000.00 |
|
Software |
$ 100,000.00 |
|
Development team salaries |
$ 60,000.00 |
|
Training |
$ 15,000.00 |
|
Total Development Cost |
$ 225,000.00 |
|
Maintenance |
$ 6,000.00 |
|
Changes |
$ 9,000.00 |
|
Operational Labor |
$ 20,000.00 |
|
Total Operational Cost |
$ 35,000.00 |
|
Approximate salary savings |
$ 54,000.00 |
|
Reduced Food Wastage |
$ 60,000.00 |
|
Total Benefit |
$ 114,000.00 |
|
Discount Rate Used |
6.00% |
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.
The identified list of stakeholders is provided in the following table.
|
Name of the Stakeholder |
Stakeholder Designation |
Stakeholder Role |
|
Smith |
Project Manager |
Manage, control, change, supervise project |
|
Sam |
Finance Manager |
Management of project fund and allocation of funds to project team |
|
Johnson |
IT Manager |
Identify IT issues, report to the developer for new development requirements |
|
Clarke |
Developer |
Development of proposed information system including all the features as required |
|
Hughes |
System Tester and Training Manager |
Test the system and train the company employees to use the system efficiently |
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.
Essay Writing Service Features
Our Experience
No matter how complex your assignment is, we can find the right professional for your specific task. Contact Essay is an essay writing company that hires only the smartest minds to help you with your projects. Our expertise allows us to provide students with high-quality academic writing, editing & proofreading services.
Free Features
Free revision policy
$10Free bibliography & reference
$8Free title page
$8Free formatting
$8How Our Essay Writing Service Works
First, you will need to complete an order form. It's not difficult but, in case there is anything you find not to be clear, you may always call us so that we can guide you through it. On the order form, you will need to include some basic information concerning your order: subject, topic, number of pages, etc. We also encourage our clients to upload any relevant information or sources that will help.
Complete the order form
Once we have all the information and instructions that we need, we select the most suitable writer for your assignment. While everything seems to be clear, the writer, who has complete knowledge of the subject, may need clarification from you. It is at that point that you would receive a call or email from us.
Writer’s assignment
As soon as the writer has finished, it will be delivered both to the website and to your email address so that you will not miss it. If your deadline is close at hand, we will place a call to you to make sure that you receive the paper on time.
Completing the order and download