System Planning & Management - Assignment Example

The part dealing with problem management highlights the issues that concern the repairs and failures of bicycles and tries to identify various trends in them. It also tries to understand the customer friendliness of a courier thereby designing a foolproof way of tracking misplaced packages, rewarding the outstanding and hardworking couriers and finding the brand of the cycle which requires the most repair, and determining the reason for frequent repairs. As a part of change management, the recommendations made by John after the trend analysis of the data from the three databases are highlighted. John, Peter, and Jane also decide on the actions for the week every Monday and plan the activities that might help to improve the situation that arose from the results of the trend analysis. The next section focuses on the aspects of release management which helps to maintain the records of the set of locks and associated keys and copies of keys for the lock sets for every bicycle. It also helps in reducing the confusion and costs of replacing lost keys or broken locks.

The section dealing with the financial management at Quick Couriers aids in the understanding of financial factors or issues involved with the expansion of the services by Quick Couriers. It helps to delve into the matters of cost-benefit analysis and competitive pricing to expand and maintain the market share. Finally, the service level management portion of the case tries to identify and bring forth the issues of managing the service level agreements and also improvement in the service processes to increase the market share and understand the ever-changing customer needs.

The issues associated with maintenance of consistency of the bicycle repairs, maintaining the inventory of the changed parts, ensuring performance and efficiency of the repaired bicycles, saving if any that was being made from doing in-house bicycle repairs and maintenance, digitizing the bills, records to reduce the hassle of maintaining the paper documents for every repair, purchase or replacement, etc prompted Peter to undertake the process of configuration management. [Configuration management (CM) is a field of management that focuses on establishing and maintaining consistency of a product’s performance and its functional and physical attributes with its requirements, design, and operational information throughout its life.

For the assurance of the quality of information, the process of configuration management used by Peter would help him to control and manage the changes in the inventory of the bicycle parts; documentation of the changes and repairs made; and help to digitize the bills and records involving this process.

The people apart from Peter himself, involved in the process of configuration management in the Quick Couriers case are: Paul (Peter’s cousin looking after the maintenance work in the absence of Peter due to illness or vacation.); Mary (Peter’s neighbor, bicycle enthusiasts who had taken early retirement and helped Peter with the repairs and maintenance of bicycles); and Jane (Jane was one of the three friends who started Quick Couriers and was responsible for the book-keeping of the business. She was interested to know about having a paperless bill maintenance system which would also help to calculate the saving made from the repairs and maintenance of the bicycles through the purchase of parts and tools to do it in-house); lastly, John (He too was indirectly involved in this process, since he was responsible for planning the courier and the logistics).

Generally, the four aspects of a configuration management system include configuration identification; configuration change management or configuration change control; configuration status accounting, and configuration verification and auditing. Also, it must be decided depending on the activities desirous of the database whether the database should be built or bought.