CASE Study

Pot Hole tracking and repair system (PHTRS)

If something is not clear in the description and you need to make assumptions to make a decision, document the assumptions you make. Please read it carefully

The department of public works for a large city has decided to develop a Web-based pothole tracking and repair system (PHTRS). The department hired a new system analyst to analyse and design the web-based PHTRS. The analyst came up with the following description of their requirement:

Citizens can log onto a website to view and make potholes report. The report contains the location and severity of potholes. As potholes are reported they are logged with a "public works department repair system" and are assigned with the given data. The recorded potholes consist of information as follows:

an identifying number,

stored with street address,

size (on a scale of 1 to 10),

location (middle, curb, etc.),

district,

and repair priority (determined from the size of the pothole).

Further, a work order data is generated for each newly added pothole in the system. A work order is issued by an authorised PHTRS employee. A repair crew is allocated to repair the given pothole with the number of people in the crew. The pothole order list details the crew members with identifying number and equipment assigned. Also, working hours required to repair the work with the amount of filler material required is feed to the system. A tentative cost of repair based on the various metrics such as hours, number of people to work, material and equipment used is fed in the pothole order list. The data associated with each pothole order list includes information as follows:

pothole location and size,

repair crew identifying number,

number of people on a crew,

equipment assigned,

hours applied to repair,

hole status (work in progress, repaired, temporary repair, not repaired),

amount of filler material used,

and cost of repair (computed from hours applied, number of people, material, and equipment used).

Public Works wants to be able store this information in a suitable database, and to later archive it into a data warehouse so as to be able to produce some meaningful analytics on the past data. In this way they may be able to predict where to direct future funding and were road maintenance is likely to be needed. Common occurrences in repeating locations may indicate heavy traffic utilizing roads that were not designed for heavy loads, and local traffic laws may need to be enforced, or traffic re-routed.

Finally, a damage entry file is created by the PHTRS employee to hold information about reported damage due to the pothole and includes the citizen's name, address, phone number, type of damage, and dollar amount of damage. A crew of repair contractor is assigned to job to repair the pothole based on the collected information. PHTRS is a Web-based based online system; all queries are to be made interactively.

For the development of the PHTRS, the department has set aside $260,000 for this project, and have allowed a time frame of 7 months. The publics works chief officer, Rachael Frabrizio, has indicated that she is keen to begin as soon as possible to implement the PHTRS systems so they can begin to provide a more responsive and faster service to the local city roads infrastructure.

Question

Write the Business Objective section of the Business Case for the above case study.