Business Requirements - Essay Example

Running head: REVISION MASTER'S PROJECT IN CHANGE MANAGEMENT-BUSINESS REQUIREMENTS ANALYSIS Revision Master's Project in Change Management-Business Requirements Analysis [Click here and type your name] [Click here and type your institution's name] Abstract One of the major problems that have not been adequately addressed during the implementation phase of the business plan review is the inclusion of the disabled or visually impaired user who uses an on-line banking system. As this should form part of the initial business project plan discussions and thus filtered down into the technical project plan implementation phase, there tends to be a lack of planning on the part of the web designers and the business unit. Due to this lack of planning in the initial phases of development, last minute patches and fixes are then initiated. The purpose of this paper is to address this specific issue in the banking industry and provide both a business and technical project plan to address this particular organizational problem. Change Management One of the important, but often missed, aspects of web or internet banking is the ability for all persons to access the internet be they abled or disabled. As the world continues to experience more individuals succumbing to disabilities, there is a continual requirement by businesses both on-line and traditional to implement changes to focus on these individuals. As part of the Business Requirements Analysis for the banking industry, our focus will be entirely on adding audio/video capabilities to an existing Internet infrastructure, such being an online banking system. As a business entity, it is important to realize that "a complaint of disability discrimination is unlikely to succeed if accessibility has been considered at the design stage and reasonable steps have been taken to provide access." (Australian Human Rights & Equal Opportunity Commission, 2002). As this consideration is understood, a complete business project plan can be outlined as follows when implementing audio and video capabilities into the banking infrastructure, as taken from the Sun Microsystems website's whitepaper entitled "Sun Java Enterprise System Deployment Planning White Paper" (Sun Microsystems, 2004). Business Plan Topic Description Business goals It is extremely important to first define how the goal of implementing audio and visual capabilities to ensure the needs of disabled clients for the bank are successfully implemented. The following goals need to be addressed in adding audio/visual capabilities: Enterprise collaboration, including features such as audio and video Enterprise portal, to allow users to access the audio/visual files Enterprise resource scheduler to upload new media content Enable online commerce to request files or further downloads Type of deployment The following types of deployments need to both be identified and implemented into the project scope to satisfy all customers: Business to Customer Business to Employee Business to Business Enterprise Employee to Employee Communications Scope It is extremely important to ensure that all parties are involved in the end goal of implementing this change in business practices and that each identified area can be solved and avoid "open-ended" statements that make the goal either unclear or unreachable. If there is any part of the scope of the change that is not identified and remedied, there is a possibility of not meeting the business needs adequately of the target audience. Stakeholders The most important business entity to satisfy is the stakeholders of the bank and this can include both the conventional stakeholder in a traditional banking institution, or, the customer who is a shareholder in a credit union institution. It is important to satisfy that these "stakeholders" are on board for the implementation and how the bottom line will benefit their profit margin. Critical qualities Identify areas that are critical to success. This allows for analysis of the design with respect to the most important criteria. Target users Identify the types of users the deployment targets. For example: Current and previous employees Active customers Membership site General public Administrators Benefits to the users State the expected benefits to the users of the deployment. For example: Ability to bank in comfort of home when their disability limits mobility Enterprise collaboration Simplification of daily tasks Increased customer base as the disabled customer is drawn into the freedom of doing what any able-bodied person can do service level agreements Define the level and extent of customer support you must provide should the deployment fail to meet specific system requirements. Typically, a service level agreement is signed during project approval, based on service level requirements defined during analysis of technical requirements. Priorities Among the most understated aspects of business planning is the area of setting the priorities of your goals. Due to large and complex deployments through large corporate entities such as a bank, there may be a requirement to phase in implementation due to testing requirements or lack of resources available at any given time. By clearly stating the priorities, you can provide guidance to decisions that will enable a quicker approval status. The following table, also provided by Sun Microsystems in their whitepaper "Sun Java Enterprise System Deployment Planning White Paper" (Sun Microsystems, 2004), there are involved constraints that need to be assessed in ensuring there are fewer stumbling blocks in ensuring project flow: Table2-2Topics for Analyzing Business Constraints Topic Description Time frame or schedule It is important to incorporate timetables and milestone project analysis in order to gauge if there are more aggressive aspects of the project plan that may require quicker implementation based on schedules of other project participants. Budget considerations In many businesses, an RFP (request for proposal) are used to ensure budgets are kept and not deviated from. This budget should always be considered during the design process to avoid cost overruns. Resources Consider all resources necessary for a successful deployment, not just the capital expenditures. This includes the following: Existing hardware and network infrastructure Reliance on existing infrastructure can affect the design of a system. Development resources needed to implement the deployment design. Limited development resources, including hardware, software, and human resources, might suggest incremental deployment. You might have to reuse the same resources or development teams for each incremental phase. Maintenance, administration, and support. Analyze the resources available to administer, maintain, and support users on the system. Cost of ownership In addition to maintenance, administration, and support, you should analyze other factors that affect the cost of ownership. For example, hardware and software upgrades that might be necessary, any telecommunications cost, and other factors influencing out-of-pocket expenses. Company standards and policies Make sure to understand the standards and policies of the organization requesting the deployment. These standards and policies might affect technical aspects of the design, product selection, and methods of deployment. Return on investment Each deployment should provide a return to the customer on their investment. Analysis of return on investment typically involves measuring the financial benefits gained from the expenditure of capital. This includes how the ROI will affect the profit margins and if the project wasn't implemented, how this would affect the bank both positive and negative. Regulatory requirements Regulatory requirements vary greatly, depending on the nature of the deployment. Technology Project Plans Once the business analysis plan has been created, the following steps are needed to be implemented to ensure successful deployment: "Perform a usage analysis to aid in determining expected load on the deployment Create a set of use cases that model typical user interaction with the deployment Create a set of system requirements that are derived from the business requirements, use cases, and usage analysis" (Sun Microsystems, 2004) The importance of use cases are important when designing the logical architecture which, with the system requirements of the implementation of the audio and video capabilities for disabled bank customers together form the deployment scenario. These will all form the deployment design phase. Figure 3.l shows the technical requirements phase in relation to the business analysis, logical design, and deployment design phases. Figure3-1Technical Requirements Phase and Other Deployment Planning Phases Usage Analysis The purpose of the usage analysis phase is to identify the various users that are required to mediate each deployment stage as well as help determine the usage patterns that will affect each potential user. Through the gathering of this information, the deployment and project teams will be able to determine what load conditions on each of the servers that the content will reside on, as well as identifying further hardware or software requirements in order to facilitate a low down-time turnaround. The following table (Table 3-1) lists topics to consider when performing a usage analysis. This is also found on the Sun Microsystems website under the document "Sun Java Enterprise System Deployment Planning White Paper"(Sun Microsystems, 2004): Table3-1Usage Analysis Topics Topic Description Number and type of users Identify how many users your deployment must support, and categorize those users, if necessary. Active and inactive users Identify the usage patterns and ratios of active and inactive users. Active users are those users logged into the system and are interacting with the system's components. Inactive users can be users who are not logged in or users who log in but do not interact with the system's components. Administrative users Identify users that access the deployed system to monitor, update, and support the deployment. Determine any specific administrative usage patterns that might affect system requirements. For example, administration of the deployment from outside the firewall. Usage patterns Identify how users of various types will access the system and provide targets for expected usage. For example: Are there peak times when usage spikes What are the normal business hours Are users distributed globally What is the expected duration of user connectivity User growth Determine if the size of the user base is fixed or if the deployment expects growth in the number of users. If the user base is expected to grow, try to create reasonable projections of the growth. User transactions Identify the type of user transactions that must be supported. These user transactions can be translated into use cases. For example: What tasks will users perform When users log in, do they remain logged in Or do they typically perform a few tasks and log out Will there be significant collaboration between users that requires common calendars, web-conferences, and deployment of internal web pages User studies and statistical data Use pre-existing user studies and other sources to determine patterns of user behavior. Often, enterprises or industry organizations have user research studies from which you can extract useful information about users. Log files for existing applications might contain statistical data useful in making estimates for a system. Use Cases "Use cases model typical user interaction with the deployment you are designing, describing the complete flow of an operation from the perspective of an end user. Prioritizing design around a complete set of use cases ensures a continual focus on the delivery of expected functionality." (Sun Microsystems, 2004) Through the use cases, a business is able to understand quantitative estimates about user behavior, which can be used to laterally design and determine system requirements for, more importantly, performance, availability, and other qualities of service. The inclusion of use cases facilitates the starting point in designing the logical infrastructure architecture. Use cases can be described at two levels. Use case diagrams Use case reports Descriptions of individual use cases, including primary and alternative flows of events. System Requirements Another facet of the project management scope is in what the system requirements are described as to match the quality of service for the anticipated deployed system. This must be provided to meet the business requirements arrived at through the business analysis. The following table (Table 3-2) from Sun Microsystems "Sun Java Enterprise System Deployment Planning White Paper" (Sun Microsystems 2004) lists the system qualities that are often used to specify system requirements. Table3-2System Qualities Affecting Deployment Design System Qualities Description Availability A measure of how often a system's resources and services are accessible to end users, often expressed as the uptime of a system. Latent Capacity The ability of a system to handle unusual peak load usage without additional resources. Performance The measurement of response time and latency with respect to user load conditions. Scalability The ability to add capacity (and users) to a deployed system over time. Scalability typically involves adding resources to the system but should not require changes to the deployment architecture. Security A complex combination of factors that describe the integrity of a system and its users. Security includes authentication and authorization of users as well as the secure transport of information. Serviceability The ease by which a deployed system can be administered, including tasks such as monitoring the system, repairing problems that arise, and upgrading hardware and software components. Along with the importance of both system requirements as well as deployment of the project is the impact on project budgets with respect to service level requirements, "which are a special set of system requirements used to create service level agreements." (Sun Microsystems, 2004) Availability "Availability is a way to specify the uptime of a deployed system." (Sun Microsystems, 2004) This is a measurement of how much, or a percentage of, time that the users are able to access various servers and also includes "the time the system is not accessible (downtime) can be due to the failure of hardware, software, the network, or any other factor (such as loss of power) that causes the system to be down." (Sun Microsystems, 2004) The only time that is not considered as "down time" is those times that have scheduled maintenance or upgrades on servers. To ensure that availability is adequately outlined in the budget document, you "typically measure availability by the number of "nines" you can achieve. For example, 99% availability is two nines. Specifying additional nines significantly affects the deployment design for availability. The following table (Table 3-3), displays the result of adding additional nines of availability to a system that is running 24x7 year-round, which is a total of 8,760 hours." (Sun Microsystems, 2004) Table3-3Downtime for a System Running Year-round (8,760 hours) Nines Percentage Available Downtime Two 99% 88 hours Three 99.9% 9 hours Four 99.99% 45 minutes Five 99.999% 5 minutes Performance An important consideration in translating ROI for business systems is what is the decided upon expectation of performance for the banking website. This requirement is normally expressed in non-technical terms and is generally stated, for example, as: "Users should expect a reasonable response time upon login, typically no greater than four seconds. " (Sun Microsystems, 2004) To translate this non-technical statement into how it should be specified in the project plan would be: "Response for user login must be no greater than four seconds throughout the day, measured at 15 minute intervals, with fewer than 3.4 errors per million sign ons." (Sun Microsystems, 2004) Scalability Scalability needs to be included in with the project plans in order to handle additional capacity loads and additional users. Normally, scalability issues are not factored in until the third year as technology changes radically change every 1.5 years (including pricing changes) and the initial technical needs should be over-compensated at the start of the project. As described by Sun Microsystems, "there are three keys to building a scalable system. Adopt a strategy of high performance design. During the specification and design of performance requirements, include latent capacity to handle loads that might increase over time. Also, maximize availability within the budget constraints. This strategy allows you to absorb growth and better schedule milestones for scaling the system. Implement your deployment in stages. Incremental implementation helps with scheduling the addition of resources. Implement extensive performance monitoring. Monitoring performance of a deployment helps determine when to add resources to the deployment." (Sun Microsystems, 2004) Financial Plan A proposed budget to finance the implementation of audio/visual capabilities for disabled patrons of our banking system would be as follows: Implementation Phase Proposed Cost Hardware costs n/a Software costs Development time Licenses $50.00/hr x 54 hours $540 Present value of potential cash flow $12,500/year Conclusion Through the implementation of audio and visual tools for the disabled customer and potential customers of the banking system, it allows the bank the ability to reach those customers that have not been properly treated with dignity and what they have been neglected as far as enjoying the benefits of what every person is afforded. By going forward with this project, it allows the bank to not only adhere to their rights as a citizen under various constitutions, but, shows the bank in a proactive light and will enjoy further revenues that they may have been precluded from before. List of Tables Abstract 2 Change Management 3 Usage Analysis 7 Use Cases 9 System Requirements 10 Availability 11 Performance 12 Scalability 12 References 16 References Australian Human Rights & Equal Opportunity Commission (2002). Disability Discrimination Act Advisory Notes. World Wide Web Access. Version 3.2. Retrieved 27 Jan 2006 from http://www.hreoc.gov.au/disability_rights/standards/www_3/www_3.html Sun Microsystems. (2004). Sun Java Enterprise System Deployment Planning White Paper. Chapters 2 to 5. Retrieved 27 Jan 2006 from http://docs.sun.com/app/docs/doc/817-5759. Read More