UNICEF Child Care Information System Development

Approach to Systems Development

This project is based on the development of a new information system for UNICEF Child Care that deals with the caring and supervision of children under thirteen. They have a particular scheme in which, the parents of the children will pay certain amount of sum of money and with the same, UNICEF will buy and provide food, study materials, toys and other objects required for the development of the children. However, with the manual system used for handling of the money and purchase of the materials, the center is facing some problems that result in the wastage of resources. In order to solve these problems, this particular project has been developed and approved by the chairman of the organization John Smith.

Based on the requirements of the project, the objectives can be determined as follows.

• To develop a new information system for UNICEF Child Care
• To develop a user profile system with user authentication procedure
• To include an online payment option for the parents of the children
• To add cyber security measures to the online payment gateway
• To develop an automated ordering system that will take input from the number of orders placed

There are several systems development methods available and a particular one is chosen based on the requirements of the system. Hence, in order to determine the systems development method most suitable for the project, first the features of the system need to be analysed. For this project, the proposed system features are as follows.

User Portal – In order to initiate online registration of users and payments, a user portal needs to be created. This portal will have a login system through which a user (parent of a child) can register and then log in using an email id / unique username and a unique password (Špundak 2014). In this profile, the user can upload his details including the details of his child and can also have the option of make online payments to UNICEF.

Auto-Generated Invoice System – One problem of the system to be addressed is the publication of invoice for the payments made by the user. Hence, one proposed feature of the system is to generate a digital invoice that is to be sent to the user immediately after a payment is made.

Auto Order – Finally, the main requirement of the system is to send an order to the seller automatically once a new user is registered in the portal. This feature will prevent the issue of shortage or wastage of materials and resources (Serrador and Pinto 2015).

Based on the requirements of the system, it can be said that the most suitable systems development methodology is prototyping.

Justification – Prototyping process will allow the developer to create the prototype of the entire system at once and then perform various tests on it. Since the system requires a number of different features, following other conventional development methodologies will consume a significant amount of time and cost.

Systems Requirements

The functional and non-functional requirements of the system are explained as follows.

Functional Requirements:-

The main functional requirements of the system are required to perform a number of different proposed actions in the proposed new user portal. These actions are listed as follows.

Login / Register – In order to access a user portal, the user needs to log in to the system using his login credentials. However, if it is a new user, the system will ask him to register first (Schwalbe 2015). Using an email id, the user will have to create his own account and add a unique username and password to the system. These are his login credentials and he can use them to enter into the portal.

Online Payment – For registration of the user’s child in the UNICEF program, the user has to enter the details of his child and then he will be redirected to the payments page (Abrahamsson et al. 2017). Here, he needs to make the payment using his credit or debit card through an appropriate payment gateway.

Auto Order System – The final functional requirement of the system is the auto ordering system that will send an order to the seller immediately after a new user makes his payment in the portal. After sending the order, the system will generate a digital invoice and send it to the user.

The main non-functional requirements of the system are as follows.

Database Server – A central database server will be used to store all the user information at one place so that they can be accessed at any required time.

System Security – The system will deal with very sensitive information like the personal details of the users, online payments and others (Svejvig and Andersen 2015). Hence, the system security must be reinforced in order to make the system secured for use.

Device Support – The system needs to be supported in the most popular devices like PC, iOS and Android devices like smartphones and tablets.

Cost benefit analysis is done in order to determine the possible amount of profit that can be earned from the project. For this project, the cost benefit analysis is done as follows. 

Table 1: Cost Inputs 

Table 2: Cost Benefit Analysis

The project schedule is shown in the following table.

Table 3: Project Schedule

A work breakdown structure is a group of work packages that are sequentially connected to each other under their respective phases. The Gantt chart shows the schedule of the project by interlinking the project activities (Joslin and Müller 2015).

Project Cost Benefit Analysis

Based on the project objectives and goals, it can be said that the project schedule and budget developed are feasible for the organization.

The stakeholders of the project are listed as follows.

Some of the relevant system information requirement investigation techniques are as follows.

Monitor – It is to be done by monitoring and supervising the activities and operations done on the workstations after the project is complete.

Survey – This is done by undertaking surveys or even personal interviews to gather user feedbacks.

Analyse – This is the process in which the project documentation is analysed in order to gather necessary data.

Justification – These techniques have been chosen as through these processes are effective methods of data collection for system investigation (Kerzner and Kerzner 2017). Furthermore, these techniques do not require much extra effort or resources and hence are feasible.

Reflections and Conclusions

From this project, I have learnt about project management techniques that have helped me to gain skills for the development of a project plan. I also learnt about various systems development methodology that will be useful for me in my future endeavours. 

In this report, a project plan has been developed for the system development of UNICEF. From the project management tools, the project is set to be completed in 87 days from the start and within the budget limit of $225,000. Furthermore, the stakeholders have been allocated with their own duties that they will be able to complete within the estimated timeline.

References 

Abrahamsson, P., Salo, O., Ronkainen, J. and Warsta, J., 2017. Agile software development methods: Review and analysis. arXiv preprint arXiv:1709.08439.

Hornstein, H.A., 2015. The integration of project management and organizational change management is now a necessity. International Journal of Project Management, 33(2), pp.291-298.

Joslin, R. and Müller, R., 2015. Relationships between a project management methodology and project success in different project governance contexts. International Journal of Project Management, 33(6),pp.1377-1392.
Kerzner, H. and Kerzner, H.R., 2017. Project management: a systems approach to planning, scheduling, and controlling. John Wiley & Sons.

Laudon, K.C. and Laudon, J.P., 2016. Management information system. Pearson Education India.

Muller, R., 2017. Project governance. Routledge.

Nicholas, J.M. and Steyn, H., 2017. Project management for engineering, business and technology. Taylor & Francis.

Schwalbe, K., 2015. Information technology project management. Cengage Learning.

Serrador, P. and Pinto, J.K., 2015. Does Agile work?—A quantitative analysis of agile project success. International Journal of Project Management, 33(5), pp.1040-1051.

Špundak, M., 2014. Mixed agile/traditional project management methodology–reality or illusion?. Procedia-Social and Behavioral Sciences, 119, pp.939-948.

Svejvig, P. and Andersen, P., 2015. Rethinking project management: A structured literature review with a critical look at the brave new world. International Journal of Project Management, 33(2), pp.278-290.

Turner, R., 2016. Gower handbook of project management. Routledge.

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