Monday, December 17, 2012

Systems Analysis Project

After working with a local non-profit agency, I was able to identify a critical business need within the organization. After meeting with them and discussing the issue, I was able to compile the issues into some analysis documents. I was able to generate a formal systems request, provide a comparative feasibility analysis for different solutions, as well as generate some user stories.

I'll be discussing this project as well as the organization as a whole in the video posted here:

Systems Analysis Presentation

The analysis of the solutions for the organization is still on-going. While the organization is still leaning toward developing a MS Access solution, I feel there may be some unexplored avenues that may provide the functionality they are looking for. It is my intention to see this project through to the end and to provide the agency with a usable product that addresses their needs.

For all developers out there, I'd highly recommend taking on some "pro-bono" work. It has given me an opportunity to reach out to my community and help those who do not have the financial resources to seek out solutions to their problems. I've come to find that there are many non-profits out there who struggle to find funding just to keep servicing their communities. Finding additional funding to hire developers is extremely difficult. In the end, I think the entire project will have taken me a total of around 20 hours to complete. While that's a significant amount of time to sacrifice for no money in return, I believe that it offers a chance to learn as well as a chance to grow professionally. In the end, I think it's a worth while investment.

It's been a blast working on this project, it has been challenging as well as rewarding. I look forward to completing this project and taking on more projects like it in the future.

1 comment:

  1. Thanks for your presentation. Some minor nit-picking up front :-) It's frustrating to have it on vimeo rather than youtube, since vimeo doesn't support multi-speed playback. Also, presenting your documentation, you really want to increase the font size - loads and loads of white space in your presentation. Cmd Shift + in Safari is an easy shortcut to increase the font size. Fortunately since it's all in a github wiki I could just go and check it out myself :-)

    Overall a good presentation although I would have love to have seen examples of their existing inventory solution (anonymized appropriately) i.e. some of the spreadsheets.

    Good to know the organization is already using some MS Access solutions; that's really important in terms of knowing the extent to which they can adopt an MS Access system.

    In terms of the pros and cons I would have thought that RoR would provide just as good user input forms as MS Access. I think it would also be interesting to try them on Google spreadsheets, as now Google drive has offline operational ability.

    Well done updating this scenario: https://github.com/mcardenas78/inventory-project/blob/master/features/issuing_inventory.feature however this one still needs a lot of work, i.e. a detailed database setup and a testable scenario: https://github.com/mcardenas78/inventory-project/blob/master/features/reporting_overdue_items.feature

    Very interesting project. Really hope you can help them with a solution. Will be very pleased if you can keep blogging about it. I think you're capturing a kind of critical socio-technical issue here in terms of the conflict between a familiar MS Access solution and an alternative cloud based solution. I think it would also be worth looking at a Google documents based solution as well.

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