Introducing A New Booking System For Student Canteen At The University Of West London

Objectives

The University of West London is planning to introduce a new booking system for their student canteen to address issues and restrictions to ensure services in student canteen is consistent with the Post COVID situation. The requirement of the university is to have a system that is accessible to any student through a mobile app to be made available for Android and Apple iOS.

• Facility to order and pay for the food within the application itself
• Daily offers to attract students should be accessible via this app.
• Allowing students to set time to collect their food at their convenience and providing reminder to students accordingly within the application itself
• Allowing employees of student canteen to update daily menu easily through this application

The project, along with adhering to these requirements as discussed needs to follow timeline and budget constraints.

The University of West London wants to change its existing system of serving students in canteen and wants to implement more innovative and automated approach for managing food orders. The idea is to have an automated system that will help in reducing student gathering and long que for ordering and taking food items as this may lead to chances of student being affected by coronavirus. Therefore, the requirement of the university is to have an efficient and automated system to ensure student safety and improve overall efficiency of student canteen services.

• To automate canteen services
• To support online food ordering
• To provide customized food delivery service along with alert for collecting food to avoid long que
• To support marketing by showing promotional offers to students
• To allow canteen staff to update food menu automatically

Project Definition

The project will help creating a new booking system that is aimed at automating current booking system in student canteen. The objectives include:

• Order and pay for the food within the application itself
• Daily offers as part of marketing strategy
• Facility to set time to collect their food along with reminder to students accordingly
• Facility for canteen staff to update daily menu easily through this application

The project including required planning should be completed within 4 months with a maximum allocated budget of 20,000 pounds.

What Is The Main Goal?

The main goal of this project is to assist the University of West London to introduce a new booking system for their student canteen as they are planning to address issues and restrictions following COVId-19 situation through an automated booking system. The purpose is to ensure that services in student canteen is consistent with the Post COVID situation while focusing on student and staff safety.

What Are The Desired Outcomes?

The desired outcome of this project is a successful booking system that will allow the university to create a safe environment for students and staff while accessing student canteen. The application is expected to help authorities in avoiding long que in student canteen as booking for food will be made through application, allowing students to collect their food at their convenience. This will not only make overall booking system more seamless and efficient but will also maximize safety of students.

To ensure that objectives of university are accomplished with the framework that is to curb spreading of coronavirus and restrict movement of students outside campus such as visiting shops. This will help to keep students safe and secure not only from covid-19, but also from other assaults and therefore, maximizing student safety and security.

The project will follow 4D’s approach including characterize, plan, create, and convey. To start with characterization, extensive research will be conducted analyzing issues to be solved through this project. As far as planning is concerned it is about creating a comprehensive guideline to describe how requirements of this project will be met. Once project plan is developed, the next part is to create the actual product for the project as per project plan. When product design is completed and implemented in actual business environment, outcome of the project will be communicated with project authorities as per requirements (Kerzner 2017).

Approach

The main product for this project is a new booking system and this booking system as per requirements will be accessible to any student through a mobile app which will be made available for Android and Apple iOS. The application will offer various features including facility to Order and pay for the food within the application itself. Along with this, the application will also provide Daily offers to attract students and this will be mainly considered for marketing. The application will also provide facility for students to set time to collect their food at their convenience and providing reminder to students accordingly within the application itself. In addition to this, this application will also allow employees of student canteen to update daily menu easily through this application.

The project will help in creating an automated booking system and will help the university authorities to provide a safe and secure environment for students and staff. In order to address issues related covid19, it is important that the university reduces chances of student gathering for minimizing chances of students getting infected while accessing student canteen. The application is therefore, as per requirements of this university as this application will help authorities in avoiding long que in student canteen as booking for food will be made through application, allowing students to collect their food at their convenience. This will not only make overall booking system more seamless but will enhance its efficiency to maximize safety of students.

• Students
• Staff
• Canteen representatives
• Project group
• Project chief

Quality standards will be set early in the project for various project activities including application design and performance testing of application. Outcomes of project at each stage will be verified with quality standards and any deviation will be resolved accordingly (Meredith, Shafer and Mantel Jr 2017).

Any change to be implemented in the project, request for changes will be documented through formal change request form and submitted to project manager and project sponsor for approval. Changes will be only implemented only after approval from project manager and project sponsor (Kerzner 2017).

In addition to this initial risks identified in risk register, any new risks identified in the project will be documented and risk register will be updated and required measures will be implemented for mitigating risks accordingly (Firmenich 2017).

Communication in this project will be managed employing various communication methods to address different communication purposes. However, all of these communication methods will be directed towards making communication transparent and involve stakeholders accordingly for ensuring successful project implementation (Heagney 2016). Communication in this project will be made through project meeting, project team meetings, design meetings, project status meetings and project status reports as per frequency as mentioned in following communication plan.

Budgetary Information

(De Souza and de Aquino Jr 2014)

Timescales

In this context, a work breakdown structure has been provided that has divided whole project into four phases including initiation, planning, execution and closing phases. Another important phase of SDLC that is monitoring and controlling has been integrated with execution phase as quality control will be integrated throughout project implementation. This WBS has been considered in creating schedule for this project and has been presented with a detailed Gantt chart showing description of project activities, its estimated duration and dependencies between project activities in various phases as discussed (Heagney 2016). This WBS along with Gantt chart will help in monitoring overall project execution, its adherence to required time schedule for completing this application design project on time and within required budget.

Features

This shows the stakeholder what is required for the project to operate as well as showing them where the money is being used.

Communication in this project will include various communication methods serving different communication purposes all of which is directed towards ensuring successful project implementation. Communication in this project will be made through project meeting, project team meetings, design meetings, project status meetings and project status reports as per frequency as mentioned in following communication plan.

Impact Of Project Progress On Business Strategies

The business strategy of the university is to provide best in-class services to students not only focusing on education but to ensure overall safety and security of the students. As the world is still finding its ways to deal with issues related to covid-19, maintain social distancing, avoiding gathering of people, maintaining proper hygiene are some of the most fundamental yet effective strategies that organizations are adopting. The proposed project will implement an automated system that will help in reducing student gathering and long que for ordering and taking food items. Therefore, this approach will help to reduce chances of student being affected by coronavirus.

Once this proposed system is implemented and mobile applications are launched as per project requirements it will ensure student safety and improve overall efficiency of student canteen services. This project will provide the university an opportunity to showcase its innovative approach in dealing with cobid-19 issues and will set example for other universities. Therefore, apart from student safety, which is the most important priority, this project will create competitive advantage for the university and therefore, beneficial from financial perspective as well.

Overview Of Project Delivery

As part of project delivery, instead of delivering a complete application, an initial prototype will be delivered and feedback will be obtained. The purpose is to identify requirement for changes as per customer feedback and make changes accordingly to ensure final product of this project as per requirements and specifications.

Plan To Release Application

A beta version of the application will be launched and provided to students for early access. Feedback and opinions will be obtained regarding issues in application performance and any additional features required. To resolve those issues subsequent updates will be released for the application to improve its stability and overall performance as per requirements.

Project Management Methodology

The project management methodology that has been chosen for this project is iterative waterfall method, which is fundamentally similar to traditional waterfall method except addition of iterations to each phase for incorporating client feedback throughout project implementation (Gharajeh 2019).

The traditional waterfall method has following benefits and drawbacks (Chandra 2015):

Analysis of advantages

• Waterfall method is simple and easy to implement and does not require extensive knowledge of project management methodology.
• Waterfall method require complete description of requirements at each project phase and therefore, requirements are clearly specified which makes it easier to identify requirements and implement project successfully.
• Waterfall method follow a linear approach and each phase is executed once at a time, making it easier to follow and execute a project accordingly.

Analysis of drawbacks

• Waterfall method follows a sequential and linear approach which makes it difficult to adopt any changes in requirement.
• Waterfall method does not allow to incorporate customer feedbacks before final project is delivered and often results in products that are not consistent with client requirements and specifications and therefore, affects project success.

While iterative waterfall method retains all of the benefits of traditional waterfall method, it makes a slight modification to traditional waterfall method as it includes iterations to each phase for incorporating client feedback throughout project implementation (Gharajeh 2019). Although agile method is often preferred for software projects, it is time consuming and requires significant investment. Agile method is preferred for complex projects where requirements are not clear when project is initiated and new requirements are added or changes are required to original requirements as project progresses. Therefore, for this project, where requirements are clarified, time and budget are limited, agile is not a recommended methodology for implementing this project and iterative waterfall method has been chosen for this project (Zavyalova, Sokolov and Lisovskaya 2020).

References

Chandra, V., 2015. Comparison between various software development methodologies. International Journal of Computer Applications, 131(9), pp.7-10.

De Souza, L.S. and de Aquino Jr, G.S., 2014, April. Estimating the effort of mobile application development. In Proceedings of Second International Conference on Computational Science and Engineering (pp. 45-63).

Firmenich, J., 2017. Customisable framework for project risk management. Construction Innovation.

Gharajeh, M.S., 2019. Waterative model: An integration of the waterfall and iterative software development paradigms. Database Syst. J, 10, pp.75-81.

Heagney, J., 2016. Fundamentals of project management. Amacom.

Kerzner, H., 2017. Project management: a systems approach to planning, scheduling, and controlling. John Wiley & Sons.

Meredith, J.R., Shafer, S.M. and Mantel Jr, S.J., 2017. Project management: a strategic managerial approach. John Wiley & Sons.

Sauvola, T., Lwakatare, L.E., Karvonen, T., Kuvaja, P., Olsson, H.H., Bosch, J. and Oivo, M., 2015, August. Towards customer-centric software development: a multiple-case study. In 2015 41st Euromicro Conference on Software Engineering and Advanced Applications (pp. 9-17). IEEE.

Zavyalova, E., Sokolov, D. and Lisovskaya, A., 2020. Agile vs traditional project management approaches. International Journal of Organizational Analysis.

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