INFORMATIO SYSTEMS YOUTH ACTION CASE STUDY

NAME: KHINVASARA. YATIN STUDENT ID: 102624 SCHOOL: GRENOBLE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF BUSINESS, FRANCE CAMPUS: MDIS, SINGAPORE LECTURER: CYRIL. ANTHONY DATE: 28TH, APRIL, 2011.

Section A:

Fig A: Rich Text Picture for the Youth Action Environment.

A2: Forming rich picture for any organization is actually the overall working process of the organization. In short, the rich picture shows overall layout of the organizational structure and working process, without applying any rules and regulation for drawing the rich picture. Coming to the point of describing and justifying the process let me take you to some questionnaire through which I would like to put my own views. A2.1 how did you identify the key actors in the environment? To identify the key actors the

very important process is to understand their workings/role the actor plays. Now i will explain you, why i chosen the actors depicting in the rich picture. Firstly, youth action charity itself. This is the head office/quarter who plays and important role.as all the working sanctions are done by the head office. Youth action is a charity located in south east of England. Their main objective of the youth action is to provide adventure and outdoor projects or projects which help vulnerable young person to improve their life in some way. It has trust board which looks after the charity and executive committee which consist of chief executive, finance director, operations manager, marketing manager, director of business and regional managers. The youth action has around 25 service centre under its roof. The youth action committee plays an important role while taking the projects and assigning them to various centers and the respective regional managers. The funding to the youth action charity is done either by local authorities or some financial institutions. Later youth action, centrally invest these funds in their service centers based on the project and also based on who has funded. The other key actors I feel is the service centers. The youth charity carries out all his programs through its service centers. As you can see from the diagram that charity has 25
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centers and every service center has its own management team. It comprises of regional manager and service center manager. Service center manager plays the key role in the process of working of the service center. He is responsible to look after the operations, employment of staff and raising funds for the center. He employees volunteers which will work on the projects and will gather the data and will submit back to service center manager, where he will feed the data in his central repository. The another key actor is the Tim, who is a full time worker managing the dig-it project. The Tim can be said as a service center manager , he is playing the very much a similar role to all service center manager of other service center plays. A group of 30 young peoples are involved in the dig-it project. Tim, the service center manager, divides these group of 30 young peoples in to a group of 3, each group working under 1 volunteer, where the total volunteer are 10. A2.2 before focusing on the rationale to choose the key issues and areas of conflict affecting the environment, first I would like to let you know which those key issues are. The first key issue and area of conflict is the charity concern about their expenses and investment. Through the analysis and interpretation, the trust board and executive committee reviewed the way charity is operating. The concern for them is, each of the services ad projects are running autonomously which indeed is increasing the overhead for the charity. The charity is mainly concern about the investment in IT at their respective service center. The second significant concern or issue and the area of conflict affecting the environment is securing the data. The charity is concern about the way the service centers are holding the data. The charity is failing to keep personal data secured and also alongside they are having the incorrect data. A2.3 the rich picture text drawn above describes the environment. The main focus

drawn in the rich picture is to focus on the overall working of the youth action charity, in the sense, what exactly the youth charity is, how is the formation of the charity, how it is managing the its charity and the service center to carry out the projects. The focus is also shown on how it is getting funded as youth action is a charity and how this fundings are being transferred for the projects and giving the salaries to the employees. The focus was also to show the reader, how the IT system has been implemented along with the role of Tim, a service center manager.

A2.4

answering the question, where does the control of system, data and processing lie

in the environment as shown in picture, the control of a system lies partially at the head office/ quarters and partially at the service center. The decisions are made at head office of youth action and these decisions are being implemented at respective service centers. The regional managers are very much involved into it. They are the members of the executive committee, who takes care of charity on day to day basis. Hence forth, the entire decision taken place at head office, will be implemented at respective service centers, the regional manager is managing. This is the way the system has been made. To justify this, let us assume there is a project available. The job of getting the funds is done by youth action charity, then based on the project available and funding available the projects will be assigned to respective service centers. More over, the funds raisng for the service center is also done by youth action head office along with salary payment, which they pay centrally. But when it comes to controlling the data, the whole control is at the service center. From the above discussion, when the project is being approved and being allotted to the to any service center, the proceeding functioning like executing the working of the project, the collection of data from the youth people, working under the volunteers. So, it gives us a clear picture that the control over the data is at the service center, where the data is gathered from the young people working in service center. The processing control also lie on the service center side.

Section B: B1. Use case diagram for the Dig-IT project

The next step is to choose the use case and give the primary scenario and secondary scenario( if exist) in quantitative way. B1.1 Primary scenario for two key use case of the system: Use Case 1: Receiving And Sending Feedback Pre-Condition: under taken project completed Primary Scenario: 1) Youth people informs volunteer about the completion of assigned work. 2) Volunteer informs the same to Tim, the service center manager and concluding the finish of project undertaken. 3) Tim, gives call to the customer. 4) Service center manager, Tim will give them a feedback about the completion of work. 5) And will ask customer to send the feed back based on the completion of work.

Post Condition: the undertaken project accomplished, upon getting the positive feedbacks from the customer. B2.1 Below is the reason for choosing the actors and reason for why they are key to the system: a. Tim, the service center manager. He plays a vital role in carrying out the jobs while working on the project. He looks over the service center operation, raising the funds for the project, employment of staff and carrying out the customer relationship by calling them after the completion of project to get the feedback. b. Volunteer: he also plays an important role where he is going to lead the youth people and motivate them. Simultaneously he enters the data into the system at his service center. Moreover, in the management system of youth action, they require a volunteer to guide young people. B2.2 the scenario I have chosen is the employment of staff. As this is the task of service center manager, who looks upon the operation of center and manages the project. So all the activities are being written from the point of Tims and the charity guidelines. So keeping those into mind and how Tim should carry out his process of employing the staff, all the activities have been included. B2.3 Speaking about picking up the secondary scenarios, I identified the secondary scenarios based on the primary scenarios which is the actual process of selecting the appropriate candidate. Secondary scenario come into exist when there is an alternate like if not that, then this. Foe instance, I suggested a secondary scenario for the age group. The charity mainly employees young peoples so as to protect them from getting into any violence act and committing crimes. Hence, if the manager do not get any appropriate candidate of appropriate age, then there arises a secondary scenario, where it says, if no candidate of proper age, then change the criteria. B2.4 I have made the assumption based on the details provided that, the IT service provided at each service station is not reliable and also not consistent. The youth action charitys trust board and executive committee face the problem in receiving the
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appropriate data. Apart from this, I am assuming that, the local authorities who are funding the charity are some of them are part of executive committee or trust of board. The another assumption I am making is , the systems are connected with third party, where these third parties are those who are funding the charity. And they funds and operates if they have to undertake any project. In real life I would have ask the first question is why the systems are connected to the third party server and why not the company severs. I would have asked this question to my IT department.

Section C: This part of the project, feel is the most critical one. The reader, expects from me to analyze my all above work done in both the section and justify him/her that, in what ways does the requirements analysis depend upon the good understanding of both the technical needs of a system as well as the environment in which the system suits? Basically the requirement analysis is done by the one who is going to build the system and create the environment. Hence, he should have a very good understanding of technical needs of the system and the environment in which the system sits. Understanding the user requirements is an integral part of the information system and is critical to the success of interactive systems. The analyst, analyzing the requirements based on the information he/she has received, believes that the requirement analysis depends upon very good understanding of the technical needs of the system as well as the environment in which the system sits. This is because, the user requirements may be something which the analyst has to go through them and understand them. The analyst, when receives the requirements from the
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user to make the system or to do the required changes, the analyst should first analyze the requirements from the point of view of the technical needs of a system, where the user has mentioned the reason why he (user) require the new technology and based on that the analyst analyze, that whether the user really needs these technology for his current system. Also, he , the analyst should understand the environment he is working in. That is, developing the system as per the users requirements, how worst will be the effect of this on the environment in which the system lies in. the analyst can go for secondary market research that will throw the light on potential users in the similar environment and its impact on the system. For instance, if we took the above example in which the service center manager, Tim goes through the above mention processes to select the appropriate candidate. That was the requirement which the user placed to the analyst where he analyze the current working environment system of the youth action charity and design the process as per the requirements. Let me take you to another instance. If we look in the part A, the rich picture text, the trust body of the youth action charity is shown, it comprises of chief executive, the finance director, and five other individuals. Whereas the executive committee is a committee of members like, chief executive, the finance director, the operation manager, the marketing manager, all three regional managers. Now we can see from the above formation, the trust board works for building the healthy image or reputation in the market whereas the executive committee works on to look at the progress of youth action charity based on day by day basis. Hence forth, this depicts that the executive committee members are decision makers. To explain more the dependency of requirement analysis upon good understanding of both technical needs of the system as well as the environment in which the system sits, assume an organization which wants to build a technology that can improve his working system. While working on the requirements required by the user, the user may unaware of the pros and cons of the technology that can affect the environment (within the organization) they are working or the system (outer environment) in which they are working. For instance, in the part A, which depicts a overall process of the charity working and the also about how the IT system works in the service center. Later as the trust board shows their concern about the losing the data and the data being over written. Hence the trust board gives their requirements to
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generate a central repository, instead of different systems at every service center. When analyzing the requirements of the user, the analyst should understand how important the required change is in the technical system. How feasible is implementing the system and what is exactly the motive behind implementing the required system for the environment. Because, though the technology brings lot of change in the system but it should not harm the system or interrupt the overall system work. Here, in this case, the analyst understand the technical need for the system as they want to keep a single repository system to insert the data into the database from all the service center by logging into the respective account to insert the data. This will help the youth action charity to keep the data safe and secure and updated for the higher authorities. Also the environment the charity sits; there is a requirement of this alteration. Because the charity has to keep a proof of completion of project in their systems so as to ensure their investors those who are funding the youth action charity, that their fundings are being implemented in best possible ways. Moreover, the system of processing the assigned work to the volunteers and the youth people also shows that, the analyst holds a very good understanding of the environment in which the system sits. The process works in a following way, the work is assigned to every volunteers by the service system manager, and then the volunteer assigns the work to the youth people. Where youths working under the respective volunteers has to report their respective volunteers after completion of work and not to the service center manager because the volunteer is responsible to inform the Tim, the manager, after completion of work and entering the data. But if the youth inform the manager directly, the data needed to enter into the system by the volunteer will not be available. This shows a crystal clear picture of the working process of service center, which depicts that the analyst holds a very good understanding of the environment in which the system works. The user requirements can also be pertaining to the technology needs i.e. the use of technology in the carrying out the process. For instance, if we look after another example mentioned above in the part B where the flow of events has been shown for the use case receiving and sending the feedback. While analyzing the requirements for this instance, the analyzer has kept a balanced understanding between the technological needs and environment in which the system sits. Initially the users requirements were, after completion of undertaken project, the youth people should contact their volunteers
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informing the volunteers about the completion of the task been hand over to them (youth people). Where the volunteers also inform the same to their service center manager. And once the service center manager gets the confirmation, he/she should call the client informing the client about the completion of assigned work. As per the analyst, the above process fits into the system. But what if while analyzing the users requirement, which states that, the client should be informed about the completion of work before the managers subordinates inform the manager. If the analyst would have implemented this task, it would have shown that, the analyst does not have any understanding about the environment in which the system sits. Moreover, the analyst also kept the fact alive that, the requirement analysis depends upon the good understanding of the technical needs. When the manager informs the client about the completion of work, he gives a call to a client. But while giving the user requirements to the analyst, the technology may be mentioned by user will be e-mail. As this is the 21st century, every person in todays world access the internet. But, as said requirement analysis depends upon the good understanding of the technical needs of a system, the analyst suggested to use a telecom technology which is very much reliable and faster too. Moreover, the analyst has taught of client, whether he has internet at his place or not.

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