Good Requirement Analysis, Planning And Feasibility Study 3 Research Paper Example

Information System Design

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Introduction 3

Requirement Analysis 3
User Requirements Gathering 3
Company and Business Requirement Analysis 4
Problem and Opportunity Definition 4
Detailed Analysis 5
System Design Constraints – Obstacles and Risks 5
Project Planning 5
Project Goals 5
Scope of Work 6
11. What is the estimated timeline for project completion? 7
12. Who will be responsible for training the users of the new system? 7
13. Who will be responsible for maintaining the new system? 7

Availability and Allocation of Resources 7

Stakeholders Analysis 7
Project Plan and Approvals and Scheduling 8
Feasibility Study 8
Technical Feasibility 8
Economic Feasibility 9
Operational Feasibility 9
Cost and Benefit Analysis 9
System Architecture Design 10
User Interface Design 10
Database Design 10
Hardware Plan 10
Software Plan 11
Network and Internet Plan 11
System Implementation and Testing 11
System Deployment 12
System Evaluation and Maintenance 12
Glossary of Terms 13

References 14

Introduction
The research paper is about the company LBG Logistics LLC based out of UL. The company specializes in national and European transportation, installation and storage of fragile, sensitive and outsized Information Technology, Telecommunications industries. The number of employees in the company is thirty. This paper proposes a new design for the company’s Information System. The overall budget allocation for the new Information System is £15,000,000.
Requirement Analysis, Planning and Feasibility Study
Requirement Analysis
User Requirements Gathering
LBG has an employee strength of thirty staff. The staff is divided into different departments catering to different needs of the company. The User Requirement is an important aspect of System Analysis and Design. There are several ways of gathering user requirement that include interviewing, questionnaire based requirement gathering, and spending time on the existing processes along with the users. The outcome of this stage is a requirement gathering document that becomes part of the overall Requirement Analysis artefacts (Kendall et al., 1992).
Personal and one-to-one interviews consume time and cumbersome. An alternative approach is Joint Application Development (JAD). JAD was developed by IBM and is a useful process in gathering requirements and cutting down on time. JAD can be replaced for personal interviewing at any stage of SDLC (Software Development Life Cycle). However, it is best to be used during the designing of the user interface (Kendall et al., 1992).
Company and Business Requirement Analysis
The requirement gathering from the perspective of the company or the business would be more focussed on the investment decisions, system upgrade, and identification of emerging technologies. The business requirements might consider the design of the system to be scalable and flexible to changing market dimensions. The company might require to have a prototype development rather than a full cycle development of the system. It might require to have a phased development rather than a continuous development. All these aspects are important to be considered while gathering business requirement. The questionnaire and the interview target audience would differ, in this case. The target audience for Business Requirement would be higher management of the company like CEO (Chief Executing Officer), CIO (Chief Information Information), Board Members, CFO (Chief Finance Officer) or other management members (Bacon, 1992).
Problem and Opportunity Definition
Requirement Analysis relies heavily on the right definition of the problem that is targeted to be solved and an identification of the opportunity. Relevant questions need to be asked during this stage of getting a right picture of the problem being solved. Problem definition will include the purpose of the business, description of the nature of the business, plans of the company in immediate and near future (Kendall et al., 1992). Problem definition is a stage where the level of acceptance of technology within the company must also be defined. The higher the acceptance, easier the implementation of a new technology based system or implementation of new features. Company’s budget and existing expertise and exposure of the staff would also be considered. The opportunity would show itself as part of defining the problem (Kendall et al., 1992).
Detailed Analysis
A detailed analysis would comprise of working on the identification of all factors for system design. The analysis would include identifying the user preferences, small level details of to-be-developed system. Identification, analysis and proposal of technologies, frameworks and other components of hardware and software for the system to be built. The detailed analysis is an exhaustive phase and would cover most of the earlier phases of requirement analysis. A detailed analysis would also include some artefacts like flow diagrams, structure chart. An important aspect of this step is to list down all the required steps in detail in order to create a robust document (Fichman, & Kemerer, 1992).
System Design Constraints – Obstacles and Risks
Identification of constraints during the system design is an essential activity. The system design constraints not only serve to define the boundaries of the system but also help in identifying the various possible obstacles and risks. The obstacles can be intrinsic to the technology being used for system developed or external like budget issues, business issues or other unknown factors (Fichman, & Kemerer, 1992). The risks involved can be similarly internal and external with respect to the new implementation or the business and the market conditions.
Project Planning
Project Goals
The creation of a goal and a milestone-based plan is important for starting any project. In this stage, the requirements are broken down into specific goals and milestones. A system design starts with identification of requirements and problem definition. Once the requirements are finalized, a comprehensive project plan is created through the use of tools like Gantt Charts or PERT (Program Evaluation and Review Techniques) diagrams. A part of successful system design is the creation of a set of milestones so that the management of scheduled activities is possible (Kendall et al., 1992).
Scope of Work
At this stage, the below questions must be defined to map the project goals and the scope of work.
1. What are user expectations from the project?
2. What are the aims and objectives of the system?
3. What is the scope of the project including limitations and boundaries?
4. What kind of analysis methodologies will be utilized to gather information and data for testing the system?
5. Who are the major stakeholders?
6. What is the availability of the participating users towards the project development?
7. What are the major deliverables for the project?
8. What are the software and hardware requirements?
9. What level of training and skill development is required for the users of the new system?
10. Who will evaluate the developed system? How will the evaluation be performed and results analysed?
11. What is the estimated timeline for project completion?
12. Who will be responsible for training the users of the new system?
13. Who will be responsible for maintaining the new system?
Availability and Allocation of Resources
LBG Logistics LLC has a staff of thirty people in various departments. The allocation of resources for the system design would vary according to the requirements and the mode of development undertaken. If the development of the new Information System is decided to be done in-house then it is important to see the number of relevant skilled resources in the chosen technologies. The planning would involve user's availability for relevant trainings. If the development is sought to be performed by an external agency, then the allocation of company staff would be in a different manner. However, in either case, availability and allocation of some of the human resources would be required to accomplish the goals.
An Entity-Relationship-Diagram (ERD) would be useful in this stage that depicts the relationship between entities like people, milestones and other things or processes. The relationship diagrams can show allocation of resources to various milestones and the relevant cardinality showing if the relationship is optional or mandatory (Fichman & Kemerer, 1992).
Stakeholders Analysis
Identification of stakeholders and considering their respective requirements is a real challenging task. The success and failure of any Information System Design depend largely on this activity of successfully managing their stakeholders. This stage of stakeholder analysis involves the identification of the various stakeholders at different stages like during the analysis stage, design stage, the implementation stage, system deployment and evaluation stage. At each stage, the stakeholders might remain same or change. The analysis would result in identifying requirements of the stakeholders at each stage, their expectations and the values to be provided to them (Yeo, 2002).
Project Plan and Approvals and Scheduling
At this stage, when a high-level project plan has been created, it is important to obtain relevant approvals from higher management. A proper scheduling of the project for various milestones and activities is required to achieve measurable results. Estimation of time is considered to be a crucial step in project planning. Gantt chart is an effective tool for creating schedule tasks (Kendall et al., 1992).
Feasibility Study
Feasibility study is the stage of identifying the whether the project is possible to complete or not. The role of the analyst at this stage is to determine if it will be possible for the company and the stakeholders to take the project to its completion. There are many different aspects to feasibility analysis including technical, economical and operational feasibility. The task of feasibility analysis is a challenging and difficult one, however further development and work can only start on the project if this stage is cleared by the analyst. The project must be feasible to be carried out in the three aspects then only it gets a go ahead for further work (Kendall et al., 1992).
Technical Feasibility
Technical feasibility is the defining the practicality of creating the new system. This phase defines if the company has enough resources, bandwidth and technology available to implement the new system (Kendall et al., 1992).
Economic Feasibility
Economic feasibility is the financing capabilities of the company. However, in this case, the company has allocated a sufficient budget of £15,000,000 for the development of the new system (Kendall et al., 1992).
Operational Feasibility
Operational feasibility is the capability of the organization to carry forward the project after its completion. It may be possible that a company has the technical edge and also the finance backing for a new system. However, it lacks trained resources to maintain the system. In the case of shortage of skilled staff, the project would get a go ahead after a plan is devised for the same (Kendall et al., 1992).
Cost and Benefit Analysis
Cost and benefits analysis is undertaken to determine the probable cost incurred and the actual benefit possible from the new system. There are different techniques for doing a cost benefits analysis (Kendall et al., 1992).
Break-Even Analysis: This technique is used when the project has to be valued based on its cost and the ability of the new system to recover the cost incurred (Kendall et al., 1992).
Cash-Flow Analysis: This technique is used when the cost of the project has exceeded the budget allocation. Also, when the project has been expensive with respect to the financial condition of the company (Kendall et al., 1992).
In either of the process, it is important that a systematic process is followed so that the management team can allocate resources accordingly.
System Architecture Design
The System Architecture Design phase starts after the projects receives an approval for all previous phases, the budget is approved, and project is ready to start. The identification of resources has been done, and budget for all sections has been decided.
User Interface Design
The User Interface Design is usually the first step and in this phase involvement of the end users and operators takes place. This is an optimal phase for JAD activities. The user interface is decided by undertaking mock screens or creating prototypes for an understanding of the users (Kendall et al., 1992).
Database Design
Database design is a critical phase for the Information System Design. In this phase, the main activities include development of logical database design, identification of the right database management systems and physical database design. Some of the main relational database systems are MS SQL Server, MySQL, Sybase, IBM DB2, Oracle 11g. Implementation of security policy for Authorization, Authentication, and Access control are also importance aspects in this phase (Stoneburner, Goguen & Feringa, 2002).
Hardware Plan
The Hardware plan includes acquiring related hardware for the Information System or upgrading the existing hardware to suit the requirements. The hardware would consist of following components (Stoneburner, Goguen & Feringa, 2002):
PC, Laptops, HandHeld Devices
Monitors
Printers, Scanners, Ethernet and LAN cables and devices
Input consoles, VOIP equipments
Security devices and terminals
Software Plan
The software plan includes acquiring software for the support of development, deployment, maintenance and use of the created Information System. The category of software required include:-
Operating Systems – Windows, Linux or Unix
Database Systems
AntiVirus
Browsers
Application Servers
Application Development SDKs (Software Development Kit)
(Stoneburner, Goguen & Feringa, 2002)
Network and Internet Plan
Network related infrastructure is required that includes, Ethernet adapters, LAN cables and internet broadband connection from a reliable ISP (Internet Service Provider) (Stoneburner, Goguen & Feringa, 2002).
System Implementation and Testing
Allocation of resources is done for the System Implementation by using the chosen software development technology. The implementation phase would include the development of user interface, business logic and the physical and logical database design. A data access layer would also be designed for accessing the data from the database. For a web-based implementation, MVC (Model View Controller) is the most popular software implementation architecture. Some implementation frameworks of the MVC are Spring and Struts (Fichman & Kemerer, 1992).
System testing would require creating a System Test Plan. The test plan must cover all the major modules, and it should be robust enough to test all the functionalities of the developed system (Fichman & Kemerer, 1992).
System Deployment
The system deployment is an activity that happens after the implementation is complete. The deployment usually happens on a web application server. The deployment is a major task, and skilled resources will be required to accomplish this task (Fichman & Kemerer, 1992).
System Evaluation and Maintenance
Maintenance of the system is an ongoing activity, and it is a critical function. System evaluation needs to be performed to ensure the smooth running of the system. A rooster needs to be created to maintain an ongoing system evaluation and maintenance planner. Small or ongoing defects detected must be resolved to maintain a healthy and functioning system (Fichman & Kemerer, 1992).
Glossary of Terms
References
Bacon, C. J. (1992). The use of decision criteria in selecting information systems/technology
investments. MIS quarterly, 335-353.
Fichman, R. G., & Kemerer, C. F. (1992). Object-oriented and conventional analysis and design
methodologies. Computer, 25(10), 22-39.
Kendall, K. E., Kendall, J. E., Kendall, E. J., & Kendall, J. A. 1992.
Systems analysis and design (Vol. 2). Prentice-Hall.
Stoneburner, G., Goguen, A., & Feringa, A. (2002). Risk management guide for information
technology systems. Nist special publication, 800(30), 800-30.
Yeo, K. T. (2002). Critical failure factors in information system projects.
International Journal of Project Management, 20(3), 241-246.