Project Case Study: Broadway Book Shop
Carrie Douglass Manager of the Broadway Book Shop owns a book selling shop. He began selling book as a hobby. Initially, Carrie Douglass would sell the books from his garage to friends and family. As word spread about his bookshop, he began taking orders from the customers such as University, big organizations etc. for different genre of books. He stared keeping 10 genres of books:
- Science fiction
- Satire
- Drama
- Action and Adventure
- Romance
- Mystery
- Horror
- Self help
- Guide
- Travel
This book selling hobby has since evolved into a medium-sized business, employing more than fifty workers. Broadway Book Shop specializes in keeping above said 10 genres of books.
Broadway Book Shops main business is to acquire books from different publishers and sell and ship books to customers which include work done by Books sales representatives, managers, and ordering books from the publishers. Each book selling transaction requires a lot of standard communication to be sent to buyers, publishers and most importantly - managing deadlines. You can consider publishers are the suppliers here.
Broadway Book Shop business processes are manual, including the creation of customer's contacts, accepting payments and issuing receipts, as well as generating letters to publishers and ordering books from different publishers. Customer's, publisher's details are maintained using a spread sheet, and appointments to meet the sales representative to ask about some book were maintained in All customer and publisher's files at this initial stage are paper based and staff often spends hours searching for a particular file. Once the customers or publisher's file is found, additional time is spent looking for documents within the particular file for sale and purchase of the books. Sometimes files would go missing and then reappear after a few days. In addition to this, the Income Tax Office requires that the file from closed sales had to be kept on the Broadway Book Shop records for 5 years. Assume discount rate to be 10%. Total development cost is $45000.00
Details that are currently manually recorded on file are:-
- Customer name, address, contacts details (phone, mobile, email)
- List of Genres of books
- List of books with each Genre
- List of requested book by the customer
- Price List of the book.
- Publishers list who supplies the book to Broadway Book Shop.
- List of book sales representatives
All invoices are created manually using pen and paper and outstanding payments are tracked by setting reminders in Microsoft Outlook
Problems with the Current System
- Only one staff member can access important information at a time which causes bottlenecks especially if staff are away
- There is some duplication with paper and electronic records
- Records are held in computer applications plus in paper form
- The system does not provide an effective means for keeping deadline details
Due to these problems, some transactions have not been handled well and customer complaints are increasing.
Carrie Douglass Manager of the Broadway Book Shop has identified that his major priority is to create a system that ties together all the key elements of Furniture transactions.
He has hired your company, Australia Wide System Integration Group (AWSIG) as consultants to carry out analysis and develop the specifications for an automated Book information system.
The tasks
For the purpose of this assignment, you are assumed to be one of the consultants appointed to shoulder the system analysis responsibilities in, Australia Wide System Integration Group (AWSIG) in the project outlined in the case study.
You will plan and manage the project as well as investigate and document its system requirements. For your Assignment 1 submission, you will produce a report that discusses this project based on your understanding of it and the related investigation results through the tasks below.
Task 1:
Approaches to Systems Development
- How would Broadway Book Shop go about developing its information systems?
- Justify your choice of your selected approach to systems development.
Task 2:
Systems Requirements
- What are the primary functional requirements for the system in the case study?
- What are the non-functional requirements for the system in the case study?
Task 3:
Project Cost Benefit Analysis
- Discuss your Project Cost Benefit Analysis.
- Provide an excel spread sheet with details in a Project Cost Benefit Analysis.
Task 4:
Project Schedule
- Show a work breakdown structure and a project schedule as a Gantt Chart. Explain both of them and discuss how they relate to each other.
- Given the system goals, requirements, and scope as they are currently understood, is the project schedule reasonable? Why or why not?
Task 5:
System Information Requirement Investigation Techniques
- Who are the stakeholders involved?
- Explain your choice of the 3 most useful investigation techniques.
- Justify the usefulness of these 3 investigation techniques.