Assessment 1 – Role Play
Instructions:
For this assessment students are allowed to work in small teams (Maximum number of 3 students) to gather information. However the all reports and documents must be prepared independently. For this reason it is expected that each of these documents will be written in their own words.
The presentation may be prepared together however all team members should contribute in some way when it is delivered.
Duration:
Assessment will be handed out on week 1 and should be completed /submitted by week 4.
Your tasks:
Task A: Business Requirements Documents (BRD)
Read the scenario in Appendix A and document the business requirements for Diamond Video Rentals in a Business Requirements Document (BRD) format.
Your BRD report is to summarise your findings and is required to be outlined as specified below:
1. Cover page identifying all team members
2. Version Control and Signoff
3. Table of Contents
4. Executive Summary
5. Introduction
6. Company Description
7. Problem Definition which includes:
a. Business Need
b. List of Stakeholders and their roles
c. Scope
d. Business Objectives
e. Available Resources
f. Constraints
g. List of Assumptions
8. Specific Requirements including:
a. Functional Requirements
b. Non Functional Requirements
9. Conclusion
10. Glossary
You are also required to create the forms and documents mentioned in the business case scenario as requested by Mary Adams the Project Manager. These forms and documents are to be supplied within the BRD report under the most appropriate section headings specified above (1-10). If the requested document is not relevant to any of the section headings specified, can be just attached as an additional document to the BRD report.
The additional documents and forms requested by Mary Adams the Project Manager, Diamond Video Rentals are:
? Organisation chart for Diamond Video Rentals with brief description of area functions identified with chart
? Context diagram of the business functions
? Draft problem statement
? Memo to Mary re Standards for documentation and records management
? Summary report of the two techniques that you have chosen for information gathering, stating your reasons, and evaluate the advantages and disadvantages of each
? List of questions to ask the client in the form of a questionnaire
? Questionnaire that covers cover customer satisfaction levels, service requirements, availability
? Draft of Diagram 0/Context Diagram of Diamond Video Rentals
? Data dictionary
? Initial draft for a requirements document (you don’t need to submit this document. Just show your draft report to your trainer to cover this task)
Task B – Feasibility Study
For this task you need to identify 2 possible solutions the meet the needs identified in the BRD. Each possible solution needs to be fully described and justified with respect to the business requirements. You should also identify the recommended solution.
Summarise your findings under the following structure and add as a separate document with BRD:
1. Business Requirements Summary 2. Proposed Solutions (2) which includes:
3. Detail of each proposed solution and how it meets the Business Requirements
4. Advantages and disadvantages of the proposed solution
5. Recommended Solution including reasons for recommendation with respect to Business Requirements
Task C – Service Level Agreement (SLA)
For this task assume that your recommended solution has been adopted by by Mary Adams the Project Manager, Diamond Video Rentals. You have now been asked to provide support for the solution. Your next task will involve documenting the SLA for this support. You will of course need to interview the client representative (your Trainer and minutes of interview is also available in the appendix A) to determine the requirements for support.
Prepare your SLA so that it includes the following information:
1. Summary of Support Requirements
2. SLA Service Description which includes:
a. Duration of the contract
b. Areas of support
c. Methods and Levels of support
d. Hours of support
e. Definition of Priority Levels
f. Response times according to Priority
g. Communications methods
h. Costing
3. SLA Implementation which includes:
a. Warrantees & Exclusions
b. Customer Responsibilities
c. Method for Service Level Monitoring (including a schedule of review meeting dates for the SLA)
d. Process for handling complaints or concerns
e. Process for changing the contents of SLA
Task D – Presentation
Prepare at least 12 presentation slides to summarise your finding from the documents you created in Task A, B and C and submit to your trainer.
Remember that you are pitching this idea to your client (trainer and class mates) and some salesmanship is required. This presentation should include the following:
? Identification of team and team members
? Summary of business requirements
? Description of each proposed solution
? Recommended solution
? SLA service description
? Method for SLA monitoring and reviewing (changing) the contents
You will be required to provide a handout for your trainer to accompany your presentation
Also create an evaluation/feedback form (1 page) with sign-off option to gain consensus form your Trainer on the proposed solution and SLA that you have presented.
Task E – Response and resolution performance measured against the SLA
Assume your SLA was accepted by Diamond Video Rentals and they have been getting the services from IT Solutions since then.
Now, Diamond Video Rentals collected reports showing performance and measured this against the SLA as follows.
Performance Vs. SLA
Performance vs SLA
Target Achieved
Priority 1 – response
Priority 1 – resolution Priority 2 – response
Priority 2 – resolution Priority 3 – response
Priority 3 – resolution Priority 4 – response
Priority 4 – resolution Priority 5 – response
Priority 5 – resolution 100% 5 mins
100% ASAP
100% 20 mins
100% 1.5 hours
100% 2 hours
100% 5 hours
100% 4 hours
100% 8 hours
100% 6 hours
100% 24 hours 96% 5 mins
99% ASAP
98% 20 mins
100% 1.5 hours
100% 2 hour
100% 5 hours
97% 4 hours
95% 8 hours
96% 6 hours
90% 24 hours
List the priorities which were not achieved and indicate why you think they were not met?
Appendix A – IT Solutions Business Case Scenario
IT Solutions is a software company. Recently it commenced work on a project for a video rental store.
You have been employed as a systems analyst by the software company, IT Solutions. This company provides software solutions to small businesses that do not have their own information technology personnel. It has systems analysts, programmers and testers, as well as the necessary support staffs.
The company has received a request from John Vandrine, owner of Diamond Video Rentals, a video store in a large rural town, for a report into the business need or opportunity in computerising some or all of the day to day business of the video store with the aim of making it more efficient and providing better customer service.
You have been assigned to work as part of the team undertaking this project. You will be working with Mary Adams who will be providing you with advice to assist you in meeting the client’s business needs.
Initial meetings have been held with the client and the following is the Initial Project Brief for Diamond Video Rentals and the minutes of an interview conducted by Mary Adams with John Vandrine.
Initial Project Brief for Diamond Video Rentals Introduction
Diamond Video Rentals is a small business that has been operating in a large country town for five years. Its main business is to rent videos to its members. There are approximately 5000 members and 10,000 videos in stock. In the early years the business grew steadily however, in the last year, growth in members and rentals has not occurred.
Business Details
The business is owned and managed by John Vandrine. There are six permanent staff and up to six casual staff.
Of the permanent staff, Deb Papadopoulos and Dawn Schultz are the most experienced and supervise the running of the store, one on each shift. Danny Jones, Paul Trang, Mae Willis and Terry De Santo are also permanents and at least two of them are rostered on each shift.
Ted Sloan is responsible for the accounting and purchasing functions of the business and Mary Johnson handles preparation of the rosters and payroll. The accounting function is currently computerised, using an accounting software package. All other functions are still performed manually. John Vandrine also manages the business. This involves planning and decision making regarding the business, and resolving problems and issues that arise, such as customer complaints that cannot be resolved by the staff.
Deb and Dawn work mainly at the counter, handling rentals, bookings and overdues. Danny, Terry, Paul and Mae spend much of their time shelving videos and any other duties as directed. The casuals perform both counter work and reshelving tasks.
Problem
The population of the town has grown steadily in the last two years and another video store opened in the town six months ago, which, whilst not as old or as big as Diamond Video Rentals, has grown rapidly in the short period.
John Vandrine is concerned that the business has not grown in line with the town’s growth and patronage seems to be static or even in a slight decline. Also, customer complaints seem to be increasing. With the advent of the new video store, John is keen to increase the competitiveness of his business.
John has asked IT Solutions to perform an investigation into the benefits of computerising the day-today business of the video store.
Minutes of interview - Diamond Video Rentals
Date: Monday 12th June 201X, 2.00pm
Present: John Vandrine, owner of Diamond Video Rentals
Mary Adams, Systems Analyst, ITSolutions
John believes that his business is not growing in line with expectations, based on the growth of the town. His measures of growth include:
? Profit - down about 2% last year on the previous year. Mainly due to a decline in revenue. Expenses remained pretty much the same.
? Number of members. Perception that the number of members has declined. Difficult to tell as members do not let you know they are leaving, they just do not come back. Not attracting new members as well as in the past.
? Number of rentals. Once again, difficult to determine, but feeling is that this is static or declining slightly.
John attributes the lack of growth or possible decline to competition from the new video store in town.
Some customer complaints include:
? the lengthy time it takes to answer queries, such as whether a particular video is available
? inaccurate information, such as indicating a video is available when it is not
? customers booking videos and not being notified when they are available
? the time it takes to process a video rental Two other areas of particular concern are:
? Overdues - slow in following up overdue videos. Should be done daily, but sometimes more pressing tasks take precedence. A charge is levied on overdues, but not retrieving the videos as soon as they are due means that someone else misses out, and this causes member dissatisfaction.
? Decisions affecting future directions, marketing strategy etc. are made based on 'gut feeling' rather than solid fact. The data about such things is in the card files, but is too cumbersome to extract.
The accounting system is computerised – a popular software package is currently used. Both the computer and the package are several years old but continue to work effectively. There are no current problems with the payroll or purchasing operations.
Much of the staff’s time is spent keeping the card records of members and videos up to date. Based on recent observation it is estimated that the equivalent of one third of a staff member's time is spent recording this information. Using an average salary of $30,000 per year, approximately $10,000 can be allocated against record keeping.
A maximum budget of $30,000 is available for this project, and a solution is required within a couple of months if possible.
Advice and requests from Mary Adams – Project Manager for you:
1. Identifying the business environment
I originally assigned Mark West to do the initial investigation into this request. Unfortunately, Mark is now unable to continue with this project and you have been assigned to this role.
Since Mark West has already completed the initial brief for the Diamond Video Rentals project, your first task will be to read Mark’s brief carefully so that you have a thorough understanding of the background to this request. To ensure that you understand the structure of the business I would like you to create an organisation chart for the company. There are software packages available for creating organisation charts, as well as facilities in common office applications. The chart should be incorporated into a word processing document for future use.
For each of the areas identified in the organisation chart you will need to briefly describe the functions.
2. Defining and documenting business problems
Now that you have an understanding of the existing business environment I would like you to define the scope of this particular business problem.
To define the scope of the project and its boundaries I would like you to create a context diagram of the business functions to be investigated. With this document and the information in Mark's initial brief you should then be able to produce a draft problem statement which we will submit to John Vandrine for approval.
Since John does not have any current standards for documentation and records management for his business he would like us to recommend a reference that could be used for this purpose. You can probably go to the Standards Australia website (www.standards.org.au) and research the standards and references that would be appropriate. Put your findings in a memo to me, including title, price and main topics covered.
3. Appropriate information gathering techniques
The Preliminary Investigation report that you prepared for the Diamond Video Rentals project was approved by John Vandrine last week. He has authorised us to proceed to the next stage of the project, which is to now gather the detailed requirements of the proposed new system.
As you are aware, there are several different techniques we could use to collect this information. I would like you to do some research into the options and identify two techniques that would be suitable for use at Diamond Video Rentals.
Write a summary of the two techniques that you have chosen, stating your reasons, and evaluate the advantages and disadvantages of each. Put this into a report form for me.
Whatever technique(s) we choose, I am sure that we will need to hold a one-to-one interview with John Vandrine and so I would like you to prepare a list of questions to ask John at the interview. It is important to keep in mind what information you are trying to obtain from John, and so you should also identify what you see as the objectives of this interview.
4. Gathering and recording client requirements data
We are now in a position to carry out the information gathering process. To ensure that the solution we recommend to Diamond Video Rentals meets the industry best practice, a good starting point would be to survey some existing customers of video rental stores to see what facilities are important to them.
I would therefore like you to create a questionnaire that could be used for this purpose. Make sure that you cover customer satisfaction levels, service requirements, availability etc.
You should then get your questionnaire reviewed by a colleague to make sure that it is appropriate and unambiguous, and incorporate any feedback into the document.
Once you are happy with it you should distribute it to current video store customers for completion. You will then have to collect the questionnaires and document the results.
5. Analyse and document requirements
Now that you have recorded all of the information gathered during the investigation process, you will need to put it together into a formal document to present to John Vandrine (owner of 'Diamond Video Rentals').
To do this you will need to create the lower level data flow diagrams to enable us to fully analyse the requirements.
You should also include a data dictionary recording all of the data elements that you have identified in the system. Put it all together in a word processed document in an appropriate format.
Based on this analysis you should create an initial draft for a Requirements Document which we can review together. Since we do not have a standard template for a requirements document I would like you to research a suitable template and use it to prepare your draft. Make sure that you identify where the template came from.

Diamond Video Rentals - Minutes of JAD Session
Date: Monday 20th March 200X, 2.00pm
Present: John Vandrine, owner of Diamond Video Rentals
Deb Papadopoulos, Dawn Schultz, Ted Sloan
Systems Analyst, ITSolutions
Purpose
? Review the scope of the system as outlined in the interview with John Vandrine.
? Identify more detail of the data and processes required.
? Get agreement from the team that we are proposing a solution which will work well for all aspects of the business and that the staff are comfortable with using.
? Identify requirements raised outside the scope as components to be developed later if cost justified, ensuring that the design allows for easy later additions.
Output
Functions to be developed Data requirements
Create a customer database Customer no, name, phone, address
Create a video database Video no., name, classification, storage location, availability for rental or sale
Customer/Video link Customer no., video no., date due, date booked
Overdue video report Date due current date, video no., title, customer name
Reserved video report Date booked, video no., title, customer name
Mail out to customers of advertised specials Customer name, address, labels, special information sheet
Automatic links to accounting system May be a later enhancement to the system?
Review available titles over the internet May be a later enhancement to the system?
Reserve titles over the internet May be a later enhancement to the system?
Low activity customers report Customer no., date last rented, number of videos rented
Slow moving videos report Video no., date last rented, date purchased, number of days rented
Reshelving list for returned videos Video no., title, storage location
Access cards for new customers Customer
Card swipe customer recognition and title link Customer no. from card reader, title from bar code reader. Allow for linking multiple titles in one transaction
The last two requirements may be outside the initial scope but the staff feel that speeding up the customer interaction will solve some customer satisfaction issues not previously raised by the owner. Actions
? John will review the initial budget and possible timing of implementation.
? IT Solutions will review the capacity of the current hardware to accommodate the required functionality of the proposed system.
? IT Solutions will draw up sample screen and report layouts for further review with the staff.

Appendix B – Useful references & information
10 tips for a perfect business requirements document http//projectcourses.wordpress.com/2011/02/15/10-top-tips-for-a-perfect-business-requirementsdocument/
Business Requirements Document: a High-level Review http://www.isixsigma.com/implementation/project-selection-tracking/business-requirements-documenthigh-level-review/
How to create business requirements document
www.ehow.com/how_2067174_create-business-requirements.html Documenting business requirements
www.klr.com/articles/Articles_BA_DocumentingBusinessRequirements.pdf Business Requirements Document template www.bced.gov.bc.ca/imb/downloads/cdmdt/dt_brd.doc 10 Tips for Preparing a Business Requirements Document www.brighthub.com/office/project-management/articles/116239.aspx The perfect business requirements document
http://ezinearticles.com/?The-Perfect-Business-Requirements-Document&id=5894630 Information on Cause and Effect diagrams http://www.mftrou.com/ Explains what an SOE is http://soe.ecu.edu.au/about/
Article discussing requirements gathering
http://www.techrepublic.com/article/gathering-business-requirements/1045549 Sample template for business requirements with explanations
http://www.klariti.com/Business-Requirements-Specification-Template/index.shtml Active listening techniques www.mindtools.com For SLA:
• http://www.nkarten.com/sla.html (Naomi Karten: Article on service level agreements and customer expectations)
• http://www.nkarten.com/mce.html (Naomi Karten: Article on service level agreements and customer expectations; excellent readings on SLA’s and customer expectations) • http://www.cio.com/archive/111598/sla.html (CIO.com: Article on the benefits of an SLA’s) • http://www.dba.co.uk/main/tips.htm (Diane Bailey Associates -Training Consultants:
interesting readings on SLA’s and change management)