Group: 2022 s2 IFB295 OLT21 7

Exercise Gear is a business-driven industry who wish to expand their market to a wider audience. Discussion regarding their current operations and business objectives, the company has chosen to utilise an online platform. More specifically a cloud Information system to shift their focus to commerce customers. To achieve this goal, the company will need to follow a sustainable project management approach in order to successfully implement the solution considering the scope, cost, quality, and time.

An agile project management approach with the combination of the DSDM framework will distinctly cover the full project lifecycle. The SCRUM framework was utilised previously to manage the company’s product backlog (business requirements) in addition to planning and deploying these into feasible increments/DOD. The DSDM framework will more precisely delve deep into the products and delivery schedules from SCRUM to ensure the project is feasible and deployable by; disseminating internal and external stakeholders, assessing the costs and benefits of the solution, performing a risk assessment and timeboxing prioritised business requirements to ensure the solutions fits within the delivery plan. The solution will also need to be monitored throughout the life cycle, this can be done by performing a burndown chart to assess the status and progress compared to the delivery plan, in addition to analysing the benefits of the plan post project.

2.1 Project Roles Summary

Please refer to Appendix A for a complete Project Roles Summary Complete Table with explanations of selected candidates and their imposed risks. The AIP Project Team is composed of six members with a combination of independent and interdependent roles. A briefing of the summary is as follows:

Solution Developers:

John Blackwood

Jane Johnson

Sara Simpson

Solution Testers:

Kevin chen

John Blackwood

Jane Johnson

Team Leader:

Jonathan Apleton

Business Analyst:

Danielle Livinston

Workshop Facilitator:

Sara Simpson

A summary of the internal stakeholders as follows using the DSDM model:

Business Sponsor:

Bill Smith

Business Visionary

Jessica Strong

Project Manager:

Ryan Murphy

Business Ambassador:

Alex Sato

Maschula Soares

Business Advisor:

Matthew Hanson

Technical Coordinator

Murray Duke

Technical Advisor

Diane Richer

Accounting Specialist

Lois Devi

IS Specialist

Sriman Newman

2.2 Terms of Reference

A brief ToR is as follows.

Business Driver for Project:

Existing information system and website that was made as a temporary measure during COVID-19 is not meeting the current needs and anticipated future growth of ExerciseGear

Objectives of Project:

Provide a web based Information System

– Customer orders and tracking

– Products

– Service Repairs

– Payroll for staff

– Reports

– Provide a mobile application

– Support private customers

– Support B2B pro gym customers

– Chat bot

– Streamlined IS features

– Provide social media integration of IS

– Staff access to manage social media marketing projects

Estimated Costs for Project

$75,000

Scope of Project:

A complete feature set for the deliverables is included in Appendix B.

The scope can be summarised as an Information System with a web front-end access for customers and staff, as well as a streamlined mobile app and a social media management package.

3.1 Outline solution

The data flow context diagram above shows the simplified process of how Exercise Gear operates. The process is initiated by a customer making an order. The order is then checked using the stock database to determine if the order can be fulfilled. If not, the order will be unsuccessful or the products are ordered from supplies as a part of the stock management process. If successful, the warehouse receives and confirms the order. An invoice is then generated followed by the payment being completed by the customer with a payment service provider. At the stages of the order being created, the invoice being generated, and the payment being completed information is sent back to the order details database. This information is stored in the order database and used to complete the next step, generating a receipt. Once the order has been finalised, the warehouse is given the go ahead to dispatch the order. To fulfil the order, the products are sent to third party delivery service providers that deliver the order to the customer.

3.2 Risk assessment

One of the main potential risks in any project management setting is estimation risk. This is the potential for the time estimates made during the planning phase to either be an underestimate or overestimate of how long a task will actually take. One possible source of this risk could be from unforeseen technical problems or from lack of experience from employees like the two IT development officers Murray Duke and Diane Reacher who both recently completed their undergraduate degrees. This can be dealt with by preemptively reducing the severity and/or likelihood of the risk occurring by drawing on experience and collaborating to average out the estimates.

Requirements risk could also be a factor in this project. While most of the project is clearly defined some parts of the project lack clarity particularly in the backend/ staff section. The potential problems caused by this could be deliverables that don’t match what the stakeholders want which leads to rework. This risk can be avoided by increasing communication with stakeholders like the owner, product manager, warehouse manager, and content manager to ensure everything is explicitly requested. This could be achieved with regular meetings and constant communication via email or another service.

3.3 Project Approach Questionnaire (PAQ)

4.1 Communication plan

4.2 Business Case

The existing information system that was hastily developed as a response to COVID-19 restrictions being imposed on the business and its direct and indirect effects on the market was not meeting the needs currently or the anticipated future growth of Exercise Gear. A more comprehensive web-accessible IS with mobile and social media extensions is required. A complete scope of the project is located in Appendix B. This completed project will provide the following three tangible and intangible benefits:

Three Tangible Benefits of the Project

1. Improved private customer access and sales via web-based and mobile access by 75% within 12 months of implementation

2. Reduce administrative lead times and red tape costs currently associated with existing IS and offline organisational processes by automating and enable self-service for HR, payroll and other staff services by up 33.3% within 12 months of implementation

3. Reduce lead times for customer order management, tracking, logistics and final product delivery by 25% within 12 months of implementation

Three Intangible Benefits of the Project

1. Expected to help Exercise Gear scale with projected future increases in online business to private customers (detailed below)

2. Expected to increase brand awareness, brand equity and brand value due to enhanced social media marketing planning, management and execution via IS

3. Expected to increase faith in the company of existing employees who see the Exercise Gear business as keeping up with online-business demands of post-COVID business world and this will reduce employee turnover, increase employee acquisition opportunities from the expanding brand name online and other talent-related benefits

Rising costs of rent, reduce discretionary incomes of consumers, rising labour costs, increased fear of COVID-19 and other disease variants, increased restrictions on small and independent businesses, especially gyms from the Australian and NZ governments which were among the most strict in the world, will see professional gym customers continued decline over time and an increase in private customer sales and online business as people have less access to professional gyms that are going out of business and more desire to train at home themselves. This will reduce the demand for repair services as private customers don’t over-use their equipment as professional gyms do being trained on by clients all day and night.

Exercise Gear’s Expected Business Outlook in Five Years

· Increased growth of private customer sales and online business, decline in B2B gym customers, decline in B2B gym customers

◦ 50% private customer revenues 50% professional gyms

Exercise Gear’s Expected Business Outlook in Ten Years

· Increased growth of private customer sales and online business, decline in B2B gym customers and repair services

◦ 66.6% private customer revenues 33.3% professional gyms

◦ SKU’s will expand from current 2,000 products to 5,000+ in order to compete with international and domestic online exercise equipment businesses

A brief cost breakdown summary is provided below:

· Hardware Costs: $7,500

◦ Server brand new configuration with scale to provide hosting and server processes

· Server Hosting and External Costs for duration of project: $12,500

◦ $2,500 set up costs

◦ $10,000 rental space and utility

· Off the Shelf Software licences for project duration and next 24 months: $5,000

· AIP Project Team costs: $50,000

◦ Expected labour hours billed for entire project: 1,000 hours

◦ Average labour rate per hour: $50/hr

4.3 Requirements prioritisation Listing

Requirements prioritization can be used to decide which requirements should be included in each version of a software product. By doing so, the most important or high-risk requirements can be prioritized, thereby effectively controlling the project budget, project schedule, and reducing development risk (Lehtola, Kauppinen, and Kujala, 2004; Berander and Andrews, 2005).

Since project budgets and time are often limited, project teams need to use time and budget appropriately in project planning to achieve maximum value with as little cost as possible. Making a priority list can effectively help the project team reasonably allocate the limited project resources of the project when planning the project, and prioritize the completion of more urgent goals within the time limit (Papworth, 2022).

When making the prioritization list, our team applied the principals in the INVEST criteria, i.e. independent, negotiable, valuable, estimatable, small and testable, to ensure that our user stories are effectively written (Stephan, 2022). The BABOK criteria, which include 8 factors that are critical for prioritizing the candidate requirements, is also integrated in the prioritisation process of this project. The 8 factors include benefit/value, penalty, cost, risk, dependencies, time sensitivity, stability, and regulatory/policy compliance (Krishnan, 2022). The BABOK criteria can effectively help teams determine priorities from eight aspects, such as judging which requirements are prerequisites for other requirements, and which are difficult to complete due to current resource constraints. MoSCoW is a commonly used method to differentiate and understand what is important and what is not in agile product management (Waters, 2009). Based on the MoSCoW method, the requirements should be categorised into four levels: must have, should have, could have and will not have. These levels described the necessity of fulfilling each requirement.

In this project, our team applied two priority criteria, INVEST and BABOK, and used the MoSCoW Method to classify each requirement into four priority levels.

For example, the Supplier invoice (s11) requirement in the Must have section uses the regulatory/policy compliance in the BABOK criteria. This requirement not only obtains regulatory support, but also strengthens the supplier’s trust in our team to facilitate further cooperation. Supplier invoice (s11) conforms to the valuable standard in the INVEST criteria. This requirement has a high commercial value and reflects the professionalism and professionalism of the business. Therefore, our team categorised Supplier invoice (s11) as Must have in Moscow method and started planning to dedicate manpower and resources to this requirement.

We also screened some needs that have potential but are not urgently needed, and put them into the Could have section. For example, the requirement “contact customer if AI Chatbot can’t resolve issue (s52)” is relatively granular and has certain technical difficulties. According to the small rule in INVEST, this requirement is not the highest priority requirement, but a requirement that can be iterated slowly in the later continuous optimization. Similarly, we have also analysed this requirement in BABOK. It is difficult to estimated the accurate development period and the follow-up maintenance time of S52, we put this requirement in Could have, which will be re-analysed and carefully considered in the plan to improve the user experience later.

References:

Berander, P., & Andrews, A. (2005). Requirements prioritization. In Engineering and managing software requirements (pp. 69-94). Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg.

Krishnan, A. (2022) Techniques to prioritize requirements, Business Analyst/Business Analysis Community & Resources. Available at: https://www.modernanalyst.com/Resources/Articles/tabid/115/ID/3332/Techniques-to-Prioritize-Requirements.aspx (Accessed: October 1, 2022).

Lehtola, L., Kauppinen, M., & Kujala, S. (2004, April). Requirements prioritization challenges in practice. In International Conference on Product Focused Software Process Improvement (pp. 497-508). Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg.

Papworth, A. (2022) Prioritising requirements – how to do it and why it is critical to project success, BusinessAnalystMentor.com. Available at: https://businessanalystmentor.com/prioitising-requirements-why-you-should-do-it-and-how/ (Accessed: October 8, 2022).

Stephan, F. (2022) The 6 Attributes Of Effective User Stories – INVEST, Kaizenko. Available at: https://www.kaizenko.com/6-attributes-of-effective-user-stories-invest/ (Accessed: October 3, 2022).

Waters, K. (2009). Prioritization using moscow. Agile Planning, 12, 31.

4.4 Development approach definition (DAD)

4.5 Delivery plan

4.6 Project burndown chart

4.7 Benefits Realisation Plan

Three Tangible Benefits:

1. Improved private customer access and sales via web-based and mobile access

3. Reduce lead times for customer order management, tracking, logistics and final product delivery

How will this be measured:

1. Comparing the number of private customer access locally to web-based and mobile application sign ups

2. Comparing the automated system processing costs, time and management to legacy systems cost, time, and management

3. Automated operational management vs Legacy system operational management

Expected Value Gained ($, % or appropriate measure):

1. 75% improvement in private customer access

2. 33% increase in support processes through automation (HR, payroll, staff services)

3. 25% increase in operational efficiency

Expected Target Date:

1. 12 months post project

2. 6 months post project

3. 8 months post project

Person Responsible for monitoring and reporting:

1. Online product manager

2. Product manager

3. Warehouse manager

Three Intangible Benefits:

1. Expected to help Exercise Gear scale with projected future increases in online business to private customers

2. Expected to increase brand awareness, brand equity and brand value due to enhanced social media marketing planning, management, and execution via IS

How will this be measured:

1. Compare stats and logistics to other online markets in the same industry

2. Customer satisfaction rate

Customer intimacy

Product impression + click through rate (social media)

3. Customer retention

Employee survey

Expected Value Gained ($, % or appropriate measure):

1. 60% increase in online business scaling

2. 50% of customers happy with the gym they have signed up for

30% increase in product adoption rate

75% increase in product impressions through social media

3. 50% of customers remain loyal and stay with the brand

80% staff are happy with their job with new online management

Expected Target Date:

1. 24 months post project

2. 8 months post project

6 months post project

12 months post project

3. 6 months post project

3 months post project

Person Responsible for monitoring and reporting:

1. Product manager

2. Online Product manager

3. Marketing Sales manager

Appendix A: Project Roles Summary Complete Table

Appendix B

Web based Information System to support business operations

Customers and prospective customers will need

Browsing all products and product information including price

Place a customer order – list of products and quantities, check available, make

product recommendations, receive invoice, make payment, and receive receipt

Tracking of customer order.

Request a exercise machine repair

AI based Chat bot feature for customer queries

Staff only access for

Create and hide product and product information

View and Edit product and product information including price

Create and/or Edit Customer details – Professional Gyms or Private

Create and/or Edit Customer order – list of products and quantities

View Customer order – order, invoice, payment, receipt and tracking history

Make a Supplier order – list of products and quantities, availability, receive

invoice, make payment, receive receipt, receive goods, and restock inventory

Pay third part delivery providers – receive invoice, make payment, and receive

receipt

Record staff details, leave taken, and hours worked

Create, View and edit repair requests

Record Repair service – Schedule repairs, record parts and labour used,

invoice, payment, and receipt

Information System processes

Customer order process – for each new order, calculate totals, send invoice,

receive payment, send receipt, change status to ready.

Customer order processing (at the warehouse) – for each order with a ready

status, generate a pick list, pack and label, and schedule a delivery with third

party provider.

Payroll Process – calculate pay based rate and hours worked, and make

payment via EFT

Repair schedule process – Create a daily repair schedule

Repair processing – For each repair completed send invoice, receive payment,

send receipt, change status to completed.

Reports – Daily Orders summary, customer orders with non-payment, orders

processed, deliveries, and others …

Mobile Application to support both Professional Gyms or Private customers