Proposed Solution to Customers Presentation

Interactive assignment – Due Jan/26

Before beginning this assignment, read the lecture, and the materials identified in the required resources section. For the final interactive assignment in this course, you will prepare a short presentation for two separate stakeholder audiences to whom you will need to communicate your proposed solution to CWI’s business problem.

Narrate a short presentation (one to three slides), and explain the changes and differences to the two audiences. Provide the information each audience needs and/or expects. Identify the stakeholder audience you are addressing. Then, post two separate audio files of no more than two minutes long—one for each audience—which delivers a synopsis of your proposed solution tailored for that stakeholder audience. Post the slides that you will use when you present to each audience.

———————————————————————————————————————————————————————-

Final Project – Due Feb/1

Cool Widgets, Inc. Solution Proposal: Part 1

Prior to beginning work on this assignment, read the lecture and the materials in the required resources for this week. Additionally, review past materials in this course to help you prepare for the final assignment. You are the Senior Business Systems Analyst (BSA) charged with analyzing CWI’s mail delivery problem and proposing a solution to address the issue. You have worked hard these past six weeks on elicitation, requirements gathering, modeling, analysis, and Agile techniques. Now, it is time to present your findings and propose a solution to help solve the issue.

Your proposal takes two separate forms. The first part is a 5- to 10-minute audio-narrated PowerPoint presentation to executive and senior management. The second part is an 8- to 10-page summary paper that provides the primary findings and the details of your proposal which will be submitted via Waypoint on the Week 6 – Final Project Part 2 page. Both parts are required to complete the assignment.

Part 1: Cool Widgets, Inc. Solution Proposal Audio-Narrated PowerPoint Presentation

Your audio-narrated presentation must be 5- to 10-minutes in duration. Your presentation must include 8- to 10- audio-narrated presentation slides to the executive board or senior management. If you need help with audio-narration in PowerPoint, review Microsoft’s Record a Slide Show with Narration and Slide Timings (Links to an external site.) guide.

In your audio-narrated presentation,

Explain how you formulated the business system requirements based on information elicited from users and stakeholders.
- Identify the primary user requirements that were identified using context and the scope of work concept from the text.
- Identify your choice of the model used for describing business problem.
- Discuss the business system requirements for addressing the problem and include the elicitation techniques you used in the requirements gathering process.
Explain the primary functional differences between the current state and future state using effective communication appropriate to the stakeholder audience.
- Identify diagrams for current and future states.
Explain the solution recommendations using effective communication appropriate to your stakeholder audience.
- Discuss the solution and how it addresses the business problem and user pain points.

Upload and submit your audio-narrated PowerPoint presentation for grading. To submit your assignment, click the Submit Assignment button.

Proceed to the Week 6 – Final Project Part 2 to submit your summary paper.

Cool Widgets, Inc. Solution Proposal: Part 2

In your Week 6 – Final Project Part 1, you submitted a Cool Widgets, Inc. Solution Proposal Audio Presentation. Submit your Cool Widgets, Inc. Proposal Paper to complete Part 2 of your Final Project to Waypoint.

Part 2: Proposal Paper

Your Cool Widgets, Inc. Proposal Paper is a summary of the primary findings and the methods used to design the proposed solution.

In your paper,

Explain how you evaluated the requirements for developing the solution to address CWI’s business problem.
- Identify examples of the techniques and/or models from your individual and group work.
Explain how you integrated system and user requirements to develop the solution for CWI’s future system state from their current state.
- Attach the diagrams for CWI’s current and future states in the Appendix.
Explain how Agile methods were evaluated and applied to developing the business solution for CWI.
- Discuss an example where you applied an Agile technique to create the solution developed for the CWI Business Scenario.
Explain how you used effective communication with various stakeholders throughout the CWI project.

The Cool Widgets, Inc. Solution Proposal Summary Paper

Must be a minimum of 8- to 10- double-spaced pages in length (not including title and references pages) and formatted according to APA style as outlined in the Ashford Writing Center (Links to an external site.).

———————————————————————————————————————————————————————-

Weekly Lecture

Putting It All Together: Proposing the Solution

Picking up the thread from week 3, recall that we talked about knowing the audience and delivering the right information to the appropriate people in an effective format. In this final lecture we’ll look at some of the specifics about the importance of presenting information in the appropriate format for the audience. As your work on your final project for the course, consider the presentation that you’ll be delivering to CWI’s senior management. What do you know about the information needs of senior management? What are they expecting to get out of your presentation and how will you deliver it?

There are any number of forms, templates, anad methods for communicating the requirements throughout the process. As an example, the authors of your Robertson and Robertson (2013) text have their own Volere© template they use to gather and disseminate information as they work through the BSA process. While the BABOK® guide doesn’t specify a form for use, it does mention that communication documentation should be formalized, thorough, clear, and appropriate to the audience. Whatever method you chose to use it should go without saying that it should be clear, concise, accurate, and be a document you are proud of when it’s done.

This final week will take you through another important aspect of the communication process, which is that of verbally delivering your message. Not only do you need to be clear, accurate, and concise in your delivery, but you also need to know what your audience is looking for and expects from you. This is essential to an effective communication session with your stakeholders. You need to consider who you’re talking to, and what they need to know.

As you’ve seen throughout this course, the stakeholders come from all levels of the organization, and have widely varying degrees of understanding about the business problem and the surrounding issues. From subject matter experts, to line managers, to end users, and to the executive level, understanding the information needs of the stakeholders requires in depth knowledge of the business and the roles that each stakeholder type plays. In depth knowledge is essential to being able to provide the appropriate level of detail to each of your audiences.

Let’s take a simple example of the differences in the information various stakeholder groups at CWI might need on the development of a business solution. Consider the differences in information needs between these three stakeholder groups: programmers, middle managers, and customer service reps.

Programmers would likely be interested in the details of the modules they are responsible for delivering on for the projects they’re involved with. This kind of information might be the number of enhancements outstanding, what the detailed testing results are on the completed modules, number and type of bugs found in the new code, and what the targets are for the next Agile sprint session.
Middle managers would likely be interested in the progress on the latest enhancement requests and how close the programmers are to meeting the delivery date of the final iteration of the software. They would likely not be interested in the individual targets for the next Agile sprint session or the bugs found in the latest code written.
Customer service and collection reps are likely only interested in when the software will be rolled out and what the impact is going to be on them and their daily work processes.

As you might imagine, each of these audiences have very different information needs, and it will vary in detail and in complexity. In some cases the data delivered may be the same, but the format of the charts or graphs might vary, or perhaps the depth of detail included may be different. It’s essential that you know what your audience needs in order to deliver the desired information in the most efficient format to the various groups. And, to do that you need to know who the audience is and understand their information needs.

Asking them directly can be a good way to get an idea of the kinds of information they want, or asking other more experienced people about the appropriate information for a particular group of stakeholders. Another way is to examine communications put out by the stakeholders themselves as this can give you insight into how they may expect to receive information.

A key element of your role as a BSA is to be able to deliver and address the information that your stakeholders need. The final project of this course will give you the opportunity to deliver a video presentation to CWI’s senior management, which will be supplemented with a proposal summary paper. The summary paper will provide additional details on the methodologies that you explored over the course of this class. This concludes the last lecture for this course. Be sure to review the materials included in the class for this week’s tasks.

Congratulations on being in the final week of INF630 – have a great week!

Reference

Robertson, S. & Robertson, J. (2013). Mastering the Requirements Process: Getting Requirements Right, 3rd ed. Addison-Wesley. Upper Saddle River, NJ

Proposed Solution to Customers Presentation