[Plan] Project Proposal - Ucard - Term Paper

Ucard

Niall Yelverton and I have decided to focus on the UCD Ucard for our term paper. 

The Ucard is a student identification card, which uses RFID technology to enable students to access student facilities including libraries, gym & pool, certain buildings.  RFID technology also allows UCD students to pay for items on campus, however payment by Ucard has not been adopted by all campus vendors. 

Plan 

To do a comparative study between the Ucard and other universities in Ireland, for the purpose of this study we will focus on universities and colleges in Dublin. Such as Trinity, DCU etc. 

Using the IDEO method cards we will gather data about the existing Ucard system and then analyse this data focusing on one or two issues and suggest design improvements. 

We are conscience that we are writing this paper for the decision makers in Ucard, so are design improvements will have to be feasible in the real world. 

Talking with the developers of Ucard we can figure out what IT infrastructure is currently in place, who runs the IT infrastructure and what can be changed in the infrastructure. 

Challenge

We have faced one major challenge already. Our main challenge is trying to organise an interview/chat with someone form Ucard, who can tell us about the current IT infrastructure, who runs it and what can be changed.  Getting no response from emails we talked with Ucard directly and are currently awaiting a response.  We will keep you updated. 

Please provide any suggestions or comments about our research proposal. 

[Readings] ISO 9000 and the very small firm

After reading this weeks (Week 7) readings one paper raised a lot of questions in my mind, so rather then give a synopsis of the reading I will outline some questions and comments I have raised in relation to the reading.

'ISO9000 and the very small firm' by E.M. Wareham (1994)

While researching ISO9000, I came across this very good video on YouTube, it also highlights some themes that were mentioned in the paper. 

ISO9000 is an international standard quality management system, from my analysis of the case, two factors seem to be affecting the use of ISO9000 for the self proclaimed 'one man band' company, Vinculum Services. 

1. Cost: ISO9000 was expensive to install and the implementation has not led to cost efficiency.It also cost the 'one' employee time to implement the project "the time was found working more hours per week". As the employee describes their was "no return on the effort put in".
2. Administration/Paperwork: Vinculum brought in a consultant to help implement ISO9000, the consultant had only implemented ISO9000 with large organisations,. (When I first read this I thought this was Vinculum mistake, but I soon realised that ISO9000 is normally implemented in large organisation, so finding a consultant who had experience implementing ISO9000 for a small company must have been impossible.) This meant the consultant expected the 'one man band' to do as much paperwork as a large organisation, this of course drowned the employee in paperwork. 

Not having any experience working with ISO9000 I found it hard to understand the advantages of the system and other disadvantages, not covered in this paper. Fortunately my father had worked with ISO9000. As a background, my father was an electrical estimator for a large engineering organisation. I have surmised his main three points below.  

1. Advantage: ISO9000 allowed for assimilation of information between departments. So when he had to send files to another department, he knew that the recipient of the file would be able to navigate the files as ISO9000 standardize the filing system among departments.
2. Disadvantage: ISO9000 required total compliance and non-compliance would raise a 'red flag'. This meant that unusual circumstance caused them to be non-compliant. Unusual issues included, not being able to find the price of a product, meaning they had to 'guess' the price. This of course meant they were non-compliant. A more common occurrence was that they had a fixed price for materials they used in every job, however ISO9000 required them to 'go out and find prices', this created extra and needless paperwork. 
3. Suggestion: Similar to the recommendation in Wareham paper, he suggests that companies should identify their necessary procedures otherwise, they will waste time on excess paperwork, which is time and cost consuming.  

Learning: What I learnt from Wareham paper and talking to my father is; what ISO9000 cost in terms of money and labour it made up for in customer satisfaction as a result of being ISO9000 compliant. Other advantages for a large organisation would be the standardisation between departments.

Suggestions: ISO9000 needs to reduce the paperwork for non-necessary/rare procedures, this is ultimately the responsibility of the organisation as they should know what procedures are critical. As Wareham states this would make ISO9000 more accessible to smaller companies. 

My other suggestion is that ISO9000 should be more flexible for rare occurrences, I realise the obvious argument to this suggestion is that it defeats the purpose of standardisation. 

(Image Credit: Quickmeme.com)

Finally, overall this paper highlights that ISO9000 is viable option for small firms, which was the aim of the paper. 

[Assignment] IONA case 2

Shane Errity, Nile Niall Yelverton and I list our findings, using the jump processes for Iona Case 2. The second half of the blog post outlines our solutions to the three key issues that we raised.

Issues:

Organisation Structure:

Business Model

 → Changed from people focused to product focused

Culture

 → Tight knit to dispersed teams (in different locations)

 → Culture of Wine and Cheese and informal Toners meetings, vanished.

 → ORBIX seen as a dead end job

ORBIX Focused:

Didn’t have a holistic view of  the company's lifecycle. (Racconn Chaos lifecycle paper)

Focused on a narrow viewpoint of just ORBIX didn’t consider how it interacted with everything else in the company.

 → This led to a cannibalism in profits

People in the company didn’t have a holistic view of the organisation, this can be seen by the quotes at the end of the Iona case 2. The Travelling Salesman example in Racconn paper, highlights how decisions are easily made if someone has all the information.

Expansion Strategy:

Linear approach to cope with a non-linear problem.

 → Orbix hired new people. Fredrick Brooks would argue this adds to the delay of the project.

 → On Call rota for engineers

 → Hiring more people only eroded profits

ART was the solution, it just  didn’t arrive soon enough

 → Every employee wanted to be working on the cutting edge of software, this made working on ORBIX seem like a dead end job, this added to engineer stress

Solutions:

Organisation Structure:

If IONA had a formal business model from the start, then the engineers would have been able to handle the quick expansion better.

ORBIX Focused:

Employees need to see/be thought the holistic view of the software development lifecycle and the ART expansion. Engineers wanted to be at the cutting edge and they didn’t realise the importance of their work with ORBIX to help ART succeed. They only had a narrow view that working with ORBIX was a ‘dead end job’

Expansion Strategy:

To cope with expansion, Iona should have changed the Orbix architecture towards a new technology paradigm, such as a service oriented architecture.

[Recap] Week 6 Managing Design and Development - The halfway mark

Week 6 notes

Spacecraft Galileo - 14 year project – Cost: $1.6 Billion 

It was a high risk strategy by NASA. “All their eggs in one basket”

(Image credit spacecraftkits.com)

NASA Philosophy '92 - '01 ‘Faster, Better, Cheaper’ 18 Billion 146 payloads 10 Failures

Philosophy smaller scopes. “Hedging Bets”

Scope 4^th variable, other three variables (Faster (Time) Better (Quality) Cheaper (Cost))

Never going to solve the problem of balancing all 4 variables but we have to deal with them all.

Fred Brooks’ Law, adding manpower to a late software project makes it later"

People and months are interchangeable, Brooks

 

(Image credit  Dilbert.com)

Alpha à Beta/Prototypes à Shipped/General Availability (GA)/ Final Release

Don’t give people an idea that it’s finished until it is actually finished

Scope = Requirements

“If you actively manage scope, you can provide managers and customers with control of cost, quality, and time." (Kent Beck, 2000)

Tools to manage scope include MoSCoW (Stapleton 1997)

(Image Credit: Managing Design and Development Week 6 slides)

Quality: Hard to measure. Are you measuring quality of the process or quality of the product?

It’s hard to describe what quality is?

Kent Beck: 'Quality is a terrible control variable'.

Cost: Every business has sunk costs. Every company has necessary costs to produce value.

Cost are equipment resources people and money.

Scope: 'Identifying the problem is the problem'

IDEO method cards a way of gathering Requirements.

It’s important to understand where the requirements are coming from. Is it the customer/ business? Hidden hand of the analysts may skew the requirements and this affects the value delivered by the project.

(Image Credit: Managing Design and Development Week 6 slides)

User Story – Goal Driven requirements – Part of the Scrum method.

Story Title:

As a…. (Identity of user)

I want to….(Minor Objective)

So that…(Ultimate Goal)

This is evidence for the project team, to show that you are addressing the need.

(Image Credit: Managing Design and Development Week 6 slides)

When you’re unsure on the requirements; (Above Diagram)

Constraint diagram with the ID’s.

Unique ID’s are essential for requirements design.

Implementation

You going to the user base, being a host to them, hospitality. (Social Norms, introduction)

Introduction of new product

Where the theory meets the practice

The learn IDEO cards

Maintenance and Use

(Image Credit: Managing Design and Development Week 6 slides)

Design complexity osculates (Traditional)

Failure doesn’t plateau in software it spikes.(Actual) Diagrams above. 

[Homework] Project Requirements Week 5

Find an example of a real world project requirement?

This was the question posed to the class by our lecturer at the end of class, otherwise more commonly known as homework :). 

1. I began my research by first asking the question, what is a project requirement?. I was trying to determine what were the essential components of a good project requirement.  
2. I finally had a 'simplified' list of what I believed to be a good project requirement.  
3. I then set about finding a real world example, which I could use in class discussion, or during the class stand up meeting. 
4. The real life example I found was a project requirement for the library of Syracuse University (New York). 

The project requirement; 'The library will have a public-facing blog that will serve to communicate library news, events and resources, as well as providing the library’s user community with the ability to comment on posts.' (Syracuse University, (2011) 

I have attached a PDF* of the project requirement for you to view. While it is not one page long, as requested, I think it's a good example of project requirements. 

You find the link to the Project Requirement HERE*. 

Additional Information: You can view the results of the project requirements HERE. 

Reflection: While I personally think this was a good project requirement example. I think the project would have benefited if some of the functional requirements were less ambiguous. I think the project requirements were good, but the overall execution was not of the same standard. I have linked the website above for your own analysis of their execution of project requirements. 

Any feedback and/or comments, are appreciated. 

*The PDF is the work of Syracuse University (2011) and not my work.