Agile Methodology and Benefits
The club, Allsports Sports club has a tradition to release the weekly newsletter by appointing new editor among the members of the club. The proper releasing of the newsletter is being headed by the club president. He needs to appoint a new editor ever week among the many thousands of members. Now in the newsletter 10 articles need to be published written by members and 5 advertisements are required to be published from the outside business companies to earn the revenue for the newsletter. In doing so, they need to face many issues like:
Difficulty in maintain the members name who has not yet reviewed the article for once
Difficulty in doing follow-up with the members who has not yet been selected for the editorial role
Difficulty in maintaining the advertisements and articles in their respective subject wise
So, to overcome all such issues, an automated system is required which can format, deliver, follow-up and so on, on its own as per the set criteria. To develop such system, Agile methodology of developing the system is the best approach for the given situations.
Agile being the modern methodology developed mainly to develop the system for such work such as related to IT or Marketing, where more human interactions are required for the proper functioning of the system. Similarly in current case there is lot of human interactions and at every step comments need to be incorporated and then only can proceed for the rest. The benefits we can get by using the methodology are:
The methodology can deliver the best service along with maintaining the transparency in the system
It is far better than maintain the data in word and excel and then grouping them according to the subjects
Even the loss of data from any such software also is nullified, once any fie is uploaded only the administrator has the right to change or delete such files.
The primary expectations from the system are:
Registration: all the users must be asked to create their account and register with the system for accessing further files of pages.
Authentication of users: all the users need to enter password while registering with the system, so that they can be asked for in future while log-in in the system. Moreover the system should not immediately provide access to all files, unless the user has been verified personally by the administrator or his representative, so that none of the unidentified user can access the system.
Primary and Non-Functional Expectations of the System
Proper access to the users: once the user is verified, full access to the system should be provided for proper utilisation of the system
Sending online notifications to users: the automated system should be capable of sending the notifications on its own as per the set criteria and club president need not personally follow-up all
Maintaining the large database: the system must be capable enough to handle large required database and also group all the files and folder according to the needs of the users.
Grouping subject wise: subject wise grouping should also be done by the system automatically.
Pending activity for the releasing of newsletter need to be highlighted at club president and editor’s system: this system is also required to properly feed information to club president for taking appropriate action
Non-functional expectations are:
The security standard of the system must be strong enough to prevent from any outside attack. The system need to have strong database management system with proper back-up server to avoid loss of any data
At the same time the web pages and the exploration of the system must be easy enough to motivate the maximum use of it
The system must be accessed from all OS and networks
|
Estimated Cost |
Amount |
|
Hardware cost |
$ 35,000 |
|
Software cost |
$ 25,000 |
|
Total Estimated Cost |
$ 60,000 |
|
Recurring Cost |
Amount |
|
Maintenance Cost at $ 1200 per month |
$ 14,400 |
|
Administration Cost at $ 100 per month |
$ 1,200 |
|
Total Recurring Cost |
$ 15,600 |
|
Estimated Benefits |
Amount |
|
Reduce salary (profit) at $ 2000 per month |
$ 24,000 |
|
Increase income (profit) at $ 1000 per month |
$ 12,000 |
|
Total Estimated Benefits |
$ 36,000 |
The cost benefit analysis is the mathematical technique to calculate the return on any investment made, so that the investor can know forehand that how much he can earn from the investment and from when one can expect getting the profit (Carnegie Mellon University, 2017). On the basis of the figures developed from the above table, by entering all the required data like estimated cost, estimated other miscellaneous expenditure and the estimated monthly profit from the system can generate few results like NPV (net present value) it should always give positive result for any healthy investment, ROI is the return on investment need to be also positive and the pay-back period that is by when we can expect earning benefits from the investment.
Work breakdown structure or the WBS is the hierarchical structure method adopted to divide the total scope of work into manageable figures. It is mainly used by the top management of the organisation to know the status of the project at each WBS levels. Then it also acts as the backbone of the schedule. Gantt chart is the technique used to distribute the scope of work along the time line of the project and is developed by sequencing the activities with proper relationships; the duration of the schedule is defined by the critical path developed during the process.
Estimated Benefits
As per the schedule developed it can be observed that the schedule hardly has any scope of freedom in the form of slack or float. So the schedule needs to be followed-up very strictly. The start date of the development project is 1st Sep 2017; end date 15th Nov 2017, which is manageable. So the schedule is achievable too.
Stakeholders are the person who gets impacted by the project or the people which can even impact the project are called as stakeholders (Usmani, 2013). The stakeholders can be divided in many groups, but to major category is internal and external. The stakeholders are:
ASC-owner, ASC-Club President, ASC-Members, ASC-Staffs, ASC-Sports Instructors
Advertisers, Consultant (HighVoltage Information Services), Investors, local authorities and even competitors
Three most popular investigation techniques are (ProjectManagementGuru, 2012):
Expert’s Review meetings: in this technique, the subject experts’ sits together and debate on some issues to find the resolutions and the way out of the topic. This is the best technique which can be used to resolve any serious issues, so that the experts can debate, discuss and resolve.
Use: it is very much useful in current situation because the Agile methodology is very much sophisticated approach but it need special attention too and need to be tracked at every stage.
Progress / Issues escalation Trend Analysis: it is an excellent project management tool which can be used to derive the progress rate of the development. And the progress or any issues can be put using a graph to plot the trends and the future of the project or the impact due to the issue going to have cab be predicted well.
Use: this can be very much useful for the current methodology being adopted where the stage completions must be tracked properly and the trend curves need to be checked properly for predicting the impacts on the schedule and cost, as both are the constraints in the development project.
Individual’s interview: this technique is used to get the unbiased feedback from the individual on the basis of set questions by one expert. This can extract the original feedback from the users.
Use: it can help in getting better results or feedback by expending less. Since the budget is constraints, so this technique is highly recommended.
Reflections and Conclusions
The methodology used and the techniques of investigation are best match with each other. The drawbacks of using the Agile methodology can be rectified by the investigation procedure. The best approach is adopted and the best investigation approaches are too adopted for getting the desired results.
As discussed earlier too that there is only two constraints which are the time schedule and the budgeted cost of the project. Since Agile has many advantages but its lacunas should also be addressed to avoid any overrun of the time and cost. The budget allocated for the job $ 60,000 could be an issue, but certainly can be avoided by adopting smart skills of spending.
Form the overall report it can be concluded that the methodology used for developing the system is best and it can be developed as per desired requirement within given time and cost and after the development, it will positively have good results and help the whole system to release the newsletter within time and maintaining the best quality.
References
Carnegie Mellon University. 2017. Cost Benefit Analysis Method. [online]. [Accessed 23 August 2017]. Available from World Wide Web: < HYPERLINK “https://www.sei.cmu.edu/architecture/tools/evaluate/cbam.cfm” https://www.sei.cmu.edu/architecture/tools/evaluate/cbam.cfm >
ProjectManagementGuru. 2012. Project Management Monitoring and Controlling Tools & Techniques. [online]. [Accessed 11 August 2017]. Available from World Wide Web: < HYPERLINK “https://www.projectmanagementguru.com/controlling.html” https://www.projectmanagementguru.com/controlling.html >
Usmani, F. 2013. PM Study Circle. [online]. [Accessed 29 July 2017]. Available from World Wide Web: < HYPERLINK “https://pmstudycircle.com/2013/03/total-float-versus-free-float/” https://pmstudycircle.com/2013/03/total-float-versus-free-float/ >
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