IFSM 636
Group Project Requirements
Deliverable 3: Systems Proposal
This report is an update of the Baseline Project Plan from Deliverable 1. Based on your understanding of the current system and the findings from your requirements determination and analysis, identify at least three alternative solutions to the problem you are addressing. You must conduct a detailed feasibility analysis for each of the alternative solutions and recommend a final solution based on this evaluation. You must identify the evaluation criteria you use, and provide any necessary supporting documentation in appendices. The specific information outlined below must be included in the sections specified:
Section I: Introduction
- Project Overview
This subsection should contain the same information as was in your organizational description, problem statement, and scope statement from Deliverable 1. However, this information should be summarized here, and also updated if your understanding of the organization, the problem, or the scope has changed in any way.
- Recommendation
This is a brief description of the recommended solution and why it is more feasible than the alternatives. This should include a summary of your feasibility analysis, as well as any other criteria that you have used to make your recommendation. Note that this section should probably be written last, after all the other parts of the deliverable.
Section II: System Description
- Requirements and Constraints
You must provide two lists, one of requirements and one of constraints. Altogether, you should have approximately 6-10 requirements and constraints. These will not be a complete specification of the requirements and constraints of your system, but should represent the most important ones and the ones that will be used to distinguish different alternatives. The requirements specify something that the system should be able to do, while a constraint specifies some condition that must be met during the development of the system (e.g. schedule or budget constraints).
- Text Descriptions of Alternatives
Describe three different alternative solutions to the problem specified in the project overview. These should be technical descriptions that outline the hardware and software to be used or organizational procedures to be changed. The descriptions don’t have to be highly detailed, but there should be enough detail to understand the basic differences between the alternatives.
- Graphical Descriptions of the Alternatives
For each alternative solution, provide a set of proposed data flow diagrams. Exactly what level of DFDs you provide is up to you. You need to include the DFDs that best represent the change from the present system. For example, if you are describing one of your alternative solutions that does not represent any change to any of the information in your current logical DFDs, only the physical ones, then you do not need to do any proposed logical DFDs, only physical ones. So you need to determine, for each of your alternatives, at what levels the change takes place (logical or physical; context, level 0, or child) and draw proposed DFDs at those levels. If the change occurs at the logical level, you do not need to provide a full set of proposed physical DFDs as well, only logical. If you feel your diagrams need some explanation, feel free to provide some textual explanation to make sure I am interpreting them correctly.
Also, please include in this section your original set of DFDs that you submitted with Deliverable 2, so I can use them for comparison.
For some of the projects, it may be the case that the changes represented by your alternative solutions are not really reflected in the DFDs and might be better reflected in revised versions of other diagrams (network, ERD, etc.). If you think that’s the case for your project, or one of your alternatives, please talk to me about it and we’ll figure out what you need to submit.
- Comparison of Alternatives
Draw a table, similar to the one on page 365 of the textbook, that compares the three alternatives you’ve described in terms of your set of requirements and constraints.
Section III: Feasibility Assessment
Write an assessment of each type of feasibility for each of your three alternative solutions. Some of these assessments might be the same for the three alternatives, and some of them might be the same as what was submitted for Deliverable 1. The economic feasibility assessment, however, must be much more detailed than in Deliverable 1. For each alternative, you must list all costs and benefits (tangible/intangible, one-time/recurring), provide estimates (including an explanation of how the estimate was calculated) for all tangible costs and benefits (using risk reduction and present value calculations if appropriate), and provide a break-even analysis, showing when each alternative solution will pay for itself. You can also provide other economic analyses, such as cash-flow analysis, return on investment, or others if you feel they are appropriate for your project. The schedule feasibility analysis must also be more detailed, including a work breakdown structure and either a Gantt or a PERT chart.
Appendix
Provide a brief statement from your organizational contact (or, if your organizational contact is someone on the project team, then someone else in the organization) assessing the systems proposal. This statement should specifically address the following questions:
- Was the systems proposal presented to you verbally or in written form?
- Does this systems proposal clearly lay out the possible alternatives for addressing the problem your organization is facing?
- Does the systems proposal explain clearly the criteria used by the project team to choose one of the alternatives as the recommended solution?
- Does this systems proposal provide all the information you need to make a decision about how to proceed on this project? If not, what other information would have been useful to you?