Assignment title: Information
Case Study: Wicked Party Planners Limited.
Background:
Wicked Party Planners (WPP) is a business that assists people by organising, planning
and coordinating their special events. It provides services such as designing and
printing invitations, handling registration for any gifts, organising and scheduling
details for the events like venues, flowers, decorations, catering, vehicles and
photography. They will finalise guest attendee details and organise and book
accommodation for the guests if needed.
WPP gets its business in one of several ways: Clients respond to advertisements placed
by WPP in specialist magazines and websites; clients contact WPP because of
recommendations from past clients or guests, or; clients contact WPP because of
recommendations from other businesses who have been involved in past WPP events.
These recommendations are extremely important to WPP and they try and track how
any new clients have heard of them. They then offer a referring client a 5% discount on
their next event. For businesses that refer clients to them, they try and maintain a
record and send the business a small gift. They keep track of the gifts that they give
businesses so that they do not constantly replicate the gift.
When clients initially make contact with WPP, an interview is held to gather general
and specific information about the desired details for their events. Examples of the type
of information collected include: type of event, who, when, where, anticipated number
of guests, price range, special wishes, party specifics and any other relevant information
that the clients feel are important.
Once these details have been collected, the office manager assigns an event manager to
the event. The event manager will then prepare an event proposal and quote for the
clients. This plan and budget is expected to be finalised within two weeks of the initial
interview. Once the clients sign off in agreement to the proposal and a final price is
finalised, additional staff are allocated as needed to support the planning and organising
of the event. The staff are specialised into categories such as wait staff, bar tenders who
need a responsible service of alcohol certificate, car parking staff who need a current
driver's license, set-up (for decorating etc) and cleaners. The WPP project team works
closely with the clients and other businesses to ensure that the clients experience a stress
free lead up to their event and that the actual event is exactly as expected.
The types of businesses that WPP sub-contract for events include venues, caterers,
bands and DJ's and florists. They try and maintain a range of equipment which they
hire to clients and keep track of this in an asset register.
The next working day after an event a review meeting is held with the project manager,
the owner John Allen or another member of the management team and members of
staff that are available. In this review meeting a document is completed showing a
review of the sub-contractors such as venues and caterers performance. This is ranked
from Very poor, poor, average, good and very good.
At the moment WPP use standard project management and office software. Business
has increased and the organization want to be able to produce an event proposal, event
Page 3 of 8
ICT310 Systems Analysis and Design Task 2
timeline more efficiently and maintain more effective organizational learning from past
events that can be shared among event managers and other staff.
In your role as a Business Analyst you have been approached by John Allen as owner of
WPP for guidance on evaluating and selecting a suitable information system solution for
their business.
Business Processes:
A JAD session with key stakeholders revealed the following information. The business
processes described below are the system requirements for this information system solution:
• Before a venue is used by WPP an inspection is carried out and details such as
facilities available, number of guests licensed for, alcohol licensing arrangements, a fee for
the use of the facility is also negotiated. This fee is reviewed every year, based on the
establishment date and renegotiated if necessary. WPP records the following details for all
venues: Name, Business number, Address, Telephone, Email, Review date, Fee, and Date last
used. Notes are also keep on the venue as part of the event review process.
For Bands and DJ's they maintain information on contact details, current charge and
type of music. They also maintain a record of comments made by staff and customers
about the music.
• The management team would like to be able to run a report as they want that
highlighted venues or sub-contractors whose performance was average or below.
• John Allen wants to run a sales report on the first of every month that shows the
amount of event, per week and per event manager.
• Any payments for purchases, salaries or expenses to staff are outside the scope of this
system
End of Case Study
Page 4 of 8
ICT310 Systems Analysis and Design Task 2
Part A
Question 1: Essay 20 marks
Your manager has done some reading and is sure that an adaptive systems development
approach is necessary for the new information systems project for WPP Limited.
Your manager has asked you to write short essay on adaptive systems development
discussing the various methodologies of adaptive development, such as Scrum, XP and UP .
Briefly discuss each methodology and then state which methodology you would recommend
and why. It is expected that you use the detail from the case study in your essay.
Your target audience is executive business people, who have extensive business experience
but limited computing knowledge.
Your essay should be no less than one thousand (1000) words and it would be best to be no
longer than one thousand five hundred (1500) words long. Appropriate referencing is
required. The textbook Satzinger et. al is a valid resource, however it is expected that at least
five (5) other resources will also be used.