High Quality Institute (HQI) Case Study

HIGH QUALITY INSTITUTE (HQI) CASE STUDY
By Student’s Name
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Introduction

Background of the Case
The High Quality Institute (HQI), a technological training institute operates in the educational
sector, offering courses in information and communication technology. The institution seeks to
develop and deploy an advance Teaching and Learning System (TLS). The intended system will
provide a range of services such as staff and student emails and a database management system
for the institution. As such the project to develop this application will also entail configuring a
database server a management, web and email servers.
Besides the configuration of the servers, a complete IT infrastructure has to be established at the
institutions to support the deployment of the intended system as well as provide a secure and
highly available communication and networking platform. The intended network will use a range
of network devices including routers, intrusion detection systems and backup solutions.
The intension of the management at the institution is to develop and deploy two online systems;
an Undergraduate Learning System (ULS) and a Postgraduate Learning System (PLS). These
systems will be developed internally by the IT department of the institute.
Aims and Objectives
The aim and objective of this report is to present a system analysis and design of the intended
system for the institution. This will entail identifying the functional and non-functional
requirements of the proposed Teaching and Learning System (TLS). The report will present a
Work Breakdown Structure which will identify the various tasks required to accomplish this
project. A PERT/CPM chart will then be developed. This will be followed by the identification
of the critical path and time requirements for the project. The report also presents a data model of
the student registration process by use of class diagrams. Finally the report presents calculations
for the net present value, payback period and return on investment.
Functional and Non-functional requirements of TLS
Theoretically, functional requirements refer to the expected functioning of the system to be
developed (Wiegers & Beatty, 2013). These are the system’s features or what the system should
do or provider for users. Functional requirements include the functions, reports, online queries
and details of data to be held by the system (Wiegers & Beatty, 2013). On the other hand, Non-
functional requirements refer to controls, constraints and attributes, which describe the systems
and can be used in judging the performance of the system. These include attributes such as
security, performance level, availability, reliability and usability (Wiegers & Beatty, 2013).
The functional requirements for TLS are;

 Enable assigning a student to an advisor
 Enable units registration
 Maintain student details and
 Maintain details of assigned advisor
 Maintain Course and Units details
Although the case study does not explicitly mention the course and units, from the other
functional requirements, the system must have a function to keep track of all courses and units
offered by the institution.
Non-Functional Requirements
 Usability: the developed system has to be easy to use, to facilitate use by novice
computer users.
 Availability: the system should be highly available at any time. The underlying
infrastructure has to be designed in a way that provides high availability; with minimal or
no downtime at all
 Reliability: the system should perform the required tasks consistently and reliably.
 Security: the system will hold personally identifiable information; as such the system
should provide adequate data security for data in databases and on transit over the
internet (Burke, 2013).
Work Breakdown Structure
A Work breakdown structure WBS outlines activities necessary to be performed in a project to
attain the project’s deliverables. A WBS outlines the activities in a hierarchical subdivision of
the project’s tasks into work areas, with the lowest level forming a work package
(Dennis,Wixom & Tegarden, 2015). In a project a WBS forms the base of all the project
management tasks from project planning, cost estimation, resource allocation and project
scheduling. The Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK) defines a work breakdown
structure as a “deliverable oriented hierarchical decomposition of the work to be executed by the
project team” (Burke, 2013). A WBS provides a structural view into a project. The main
functions of a work breakdown structure include;
 Enables scope definition
 Facilitates resource allocation to tasks
 Enables the establishment of a control baseline
 Provides means of measuring project progress and accomplishments by defining
milestones (Burke, 2013)
The work breakdown Structure for this project is as follows;
Task No Description Predecessors Duration