Systems Analysis and Design

All questions in the work are about a real world system development case. Please read it carefully before you start the exam.

all questions are asked at the end answer one through four

Willowbrook School is a small, private school in the Midwest United States. For the past 20 years, it has offered a curriculum for preschool through 6th grade. Five years ago it expanded to offer after-school care, usually referred to as after care, on premises. After-care is not only offered to Willowbrooks students, but also for students of other schools in the area. As an independent systems analyst, you specialize in developing IT solutions for small businesses. You have been contacted by the director, Victoria Owens, to discuss the possibility of setting up a computer system to handle some of the schools administrative and financial tasks. She explains to you that Willowbrook is experiencing significant increases in enrollment applications for all programs. Increases in applications, coupled with increased demand for after-school care, have led to a very high workload for the administrative personnel and staff. The principal and teachers have stepped in where possible, but the demand is becoming too great. Willowbrook School is a non-profit, and is not in a position to hire another full-time administrative position, which is what the principal and director think would be needed to handle the increased workload. You agree to meet with Victoria and the principal, Kathy Gilliard next week to discuss the school and its need for an information system. You sit down with Victoria and Kathy on Wednesday to ask them some questions to help you determine what type of information system they need. You explain to them that information systems bring computer hardware and software together with people, processes, and data to produce specific results. They are excited to tell you about their situation and what they have in mind for a computer system to help with some of the work load. To help you with planning for the information system, you ask them about what personnel they have, as well as some questions to determine what types of information each person needs to do their job. Victoria explains her role as the executive director of the school. She administers the activities of the school in accordance with the mission, vision, and policies established by the Board of Directors. She supports the educational staff and oversees the financial, payroll, and human resources functions for the school. She also prepares all necessary reports and evaluations for the state and local school boards. Kathy says that as the principal of Willowbrook she handles the academic and curricular issues that arise, and ensures that the school meets all federal and state educational standards. Kathy and the teachers who report to her make decisions jointly about admissions and assignments to classrooms. The two kitchen staff personnel, a head cook and an assistant, also report to the principal. She also coordinates students bus transportation schedule. The school contracts with a local bussing company to provide transportation for some students in the area. Some after-care students are dropped off by the local public school districts busses, and she coordinates with the districts transportation department. Kathy also substitutes in any of the school classrooms when a teacher is out. Susan Brown is the vice principal. She is responsible for the after-care program. While students must be pre-registered for after-care required on a daily basis, the school does offer drop-in care on an as space allows basis. Susan handles all requests for drop-in care in consultation with the after-care teachers. She also maintains the school calendar, prepares handouts and reminders for parents, keeps track of special dietary needs of the students, and administers the camps that run during the two weeks that the school is not in session during the spring, and the summer programs that run through July and August. Michelle Madrid is the administrative assistant. She sends out monthly bills for tuition and after-care, records payments, and handles bank deposits. She has traditionally handled or been responsible for all administrative tasks related to tuition and after-care fees. She maintains all student records, and ensures that contact and pick-up lists for all classrooms and after-care programs are up-to-date. Currently, Michelle handles all her responsibilities using Microsoft Word and Excel. She is comfortable with the applications, but finds that maintaining records and producing reports, payroll, etc. results in a lot of duplication of effort, as she has to copy a lot of information from one worksheet or document to another. Now she feels the amount of time spent copying information from one place to another is daunting, and the possibility of errors is increasing. An information system is necessary to cope with the growing administrative workload. There are eleven full-time teachers at Willowbrook, three for the pre-school program, two for the kindergarten program, and one for each grade 1-6. There are five teachers aides, for the pre-school-kindergarten and the grades 13 programs. Teachers aides report to their respective teachers. Each teacher is responsible for keeping attendance records and recording them in the student files. There are six part-time after-care teachers, three for the pre-school/kindergarten group, and three for the primary grades. After-care teachers report to Susan Brown. Each after-care teacher has part-time assistants assigned to the program. Assistants report to the after-care teacher. The number of students pre-registered in the after-care program determines the number of assistants. The after-care teachers are responsible for keeping time sheets for their part-time assistants and submitting them every two weeks to Susan Brown. In addition, the after-care teachers are responsible for submitting weekly summary sheets to Susan Brown detailing any hours above those pre-registered for that students spent in the after-care program, so that parents are billed for the additional time. Like many other non-profit schools, Willowbrook relies on volunteer time from parents to accomplish many of the tasks essential to the running of the school. A financial committee examines monthly financial reports, a fund-raising committee evaluates possible fund-raising projects and handles approved fund-raising. In addition, individual parents step in as needed to do routine office tasks, such as copying and distributing handouts, to free up Michelle Madrid for other tasks. Parents also fill in as assistants in the after-care programs when needed, and qualified parents step into the classroom as teachers aides whenever possible to reduce the reliance on substitute teachers. You have found this information very useful and are convinced that the school needs a computer system. However, you feel you need more information about the proposed system so that you can perform a feasibility analysis (operational, technical and economic).

Q1. List the people you like to interview for collecting further information? For each person, prepare a list of questions you would ask.

Q2. While you went to interview some more people, Victoria Owens saw you and called you in to understand the process that is going to be used to develop this system. She particularly wants to know what kind of involvement her folks would have as the system gets develops? What would you tell her?

Q3. Victoria wants to know if it will be cost effective to do this project. You must examine tangible costs and benefits to determine the economic feasibility of the system. The finance and fund-raising committees will need to examine the costs and benefits to determine if the development process will go ahead. If Willowbrook School decides to go ahead with development, the system will be developed in-house Currently, Michelle Madrid is logging 10 hours of overtime a week due to the increased workload associated with increased enrollment and school expansion. She is being compensated for overtime at a cost of $22.50 per hour including overhead expenses. Based on current enrollment projections, the overtime will need to be expanded to 15 hours a week in the next school year. The overtime requirement would be eliminated if Willowbrook implements the new system. The current system now causes an average of six errors per week, and each error takes about 20 minutes to correct. The new system should eliminate those errors. Based on your research, you estimated by working 35 hours per week you could complete an in-house development project in about 8 weeks. Your consulting rate, which Willowbrook agreed to, is $35 per hour. If you design the new system as a database application, you can expect to spend about $1,500 for a networked commercial package. One of the parents at Willowbrook has extensive experience with this package as a Database Administrator at a local company, and has committed to providing 10 hours per week working with you to develop the project. After the system is operational and the staff is trained, you hope that Willowbrook staff and volunteers can handle routine maintenance tasks without your assistance. If they continue to require your assistance, a contract rate can be negotiated later depending on the nature of the problem. You have agreed to provide five hours per week of training and support for the first two months of operation. After the new system is operational, it will need routine maintenance, file backups, and updating. These tasks will require about four hours per week and will be performed by school staff or parent volunteers at an average hourly rate of $12.50. The necessary hardware will cost about $3,500. Hardware and network installation will be partially provided by three parent volunteers. In your view, the useful life of the system will be about five years, including the year in which the system becomes operational. The development of the new system will occur in Year 0, but the system will not be used until Year 1. The school will use the manual system during development, and will switch over to the new system during the month of June, to start the new school year on the new system. Use $15.00 per hour for any rate not previously stated in the case. A. List all the costs and benefits for the system. Estimate their values as they occur. B. Develop a cost-benefit analysis, using payback analysis, ROI, and present value (assume a discount rate of 6 percent). Use the economic analysis template discussed in the class.

Q4. Background: Victoria is very happy with the economic analysis. She wants to go ahead and prepare a project plan. You explain to Victoria that for project management, all of these major tasks and more specific, detailed tasks go into a chart that is used to create a work breakdown structure (WBS). You describe to her the main types of WBS Gantt charts and PERT charts and how they are used. You offer to show her the WBS charts you will create for Willowbrooks project. a. Create a list of tasks that need to be completed for the new information system based on the information given in the case. Organize your list by estimating how long it will take to complete each task, and list each tasks predecessor task or tasks. (Hint: make up some reasonable numbers). b. Create a Project Plan.

Q5. Background: After you conducted interviews with more folks, you came back and summarized all the information as follows: Information Gathered from Interviews Registration for Willowbrook School has two components, regular daily students and children in after-care. Regular daily students are divided into groups, dependent on whether the child is in pre-school, kindergarten, or primary school. Children in after-care are divided into two groups, those students who are pre-registered and those who use the service on a drop-in basis. Most of the students who are pre-registered for after-care attend the school during the day but some are bussed in from other schools. For a student to be registered, tuition payments must be in good standing. There are two payment options for tuition and the pre-registered component of after-care, monthly or weekly. Regular daily tuition is based on the academic program in which the student is enrolled. A discount of 5 percent is applied to fees for parents choosing the monthly payment option. Parents who have more than one child enrolled at Willowbrook are eligible for an additional 5 percent multi-child discount on tuition for all enrolled children. Discounts are lost for any payment that is overdue by more than seven days. Charges for after-care used on a drop-in basis are based on an hourly rate, billed in fifteen minute increments. Parents are billed monthly for regular students, and charges are added to the monthly and weekly bills. New bills are generated weekly for drop-in care for children who are not pre-registered for after-care or regular daily students. For parents who pay monthly, tuition bills and after-care fees are due on the first of the month, and are distributed to parents one week prior to their being due. For parents who pay weekly, payments are due on Mondays with bills generated on Fridays. Parents who have more than one child enrolled in Willowbrook receive a separate bill for each child. The students account must be in good standing for a student to be registered. For the account to be considered to be in good standing, the tuition payment must not be over seven days late. Tuition payments that are over seven days late may be overridden by the director; these cases are handled on a case-by-case basis. The current registration system is done using Microsoft Excel. Michelle Madrid, the administrative assistant, sets up a new workbook for each academic year. Each month Michelle creates a new worksheet in the workbook. The worksheet contains one line per student, and each line contains the following registration and billing information for the student:

Student Name

Parent Name

Address

Academic program (pre-school, kindergarten, primary school grade 1-6)

After-Care (Yes/No)

Weekly tuition fee

Billing cycle (Monthly or Weekly)

Tuition discount

Multi-child discount

Amount of discount (calculated field)

Additional care, after-care drop-in fees

Total monthly fee (calculated field)

Payment received

Amount paid to date (calculated field)

Amount outstanding (calculated field)

The entry for each student is updated monthly when bills are prepared, each time a payment is made, and when Michelle enters the data from the after-care reports detailing all drop-in hours for each student. Michelle manually calculates the time and the spreadsheet calculates the charges. Monthly statements are generated from the spreadsheets using the mail merge tool in Microsoft Word. A summary monthly report is generated for the Board of Directors from this spreadsheet summarizing fee collections for tuition and after care. The financial committee, who provides regular oversight for the Board, also receives separate monthly reports detailing payroll expenses for all employees. Reports need to be ready for distribution at the financial committee meeting that is scheduled for the second Tuesday of every month. Michelle has indicated that the most useful new feature that could be added to the system would be the ability to generate one bill per family, listing each students charges separately, and an overall total. Also useful would be the ability to generate a receipt at the time payments are recorded. This receipt should contain information required for reimbursement requests from different types of dependent care and tuition accounts, including name, location, and federal tax ID number of the school. In addition, parents have asked for a separate statement accompanying their bill itemizing all drop-in after-care hours for that statement. A. Write the requirements (functional as well as non-functional) for the system using a numbering scheme as discussed in the class.

Q6. Now you want to make sure that you have captured all the information about how this system is going to be used. So, now you decided to write main use cases. a. List the main use cases for this system. b. For one of those use cases, prepare the details using the long template provided in the class.

Q7. You discuss the system requirements and use cases with Victoria and she is in agreement with you on what you have identified as necessary components of the new system. The next step is to develop a process model of the proposed billing system. You explain to her how you will develop data flow diagrams (DFDs) that will be used to graphically show how data input will move through a system and be turned into useful information. a. Prepare a context diagram for the new system. b. Prepare a 0-level diagram for the new system. c. Prepare one 1-level diag