[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. 

[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.