Assignment+2+-+Karwa+Taxi

** Due date: 10:30am on Tuesday, October 18, 2011 **
Assignment #2 clarifications page

Overview:
In this assignment you will work as an IS Business Analyst who has been tasked with conducting stakeholder and requirements analyses for Karwa Taxi, a company that provides taxi service throughout Qatar. You may work on the assignment individually, or in teams of 2 or 3 people. You will produce a project abstract and business process description document, a stakeholder analysis document, and a requirements analysis document that lists 20 carefully specified requirements. The description of the taxi service, the details regarding the IS project, and what exactly the company managers are looking for is intentionally left vague. You should use your experience, business judgement, and common sense to fill in the gaps of the scenario and come up with a reasonable set of requirements. You should also use the techniques for gathering effective requirements that we cover in class. Part of your task as an IS Business Analyst in this case is to help the customer (the owners and managers of Karwa) to better understand the problem they are trying to solve and to make good decisions about what system they should build, and what it needs to do in order to help the business.

It is ok to make assumptions as you are doing this exercise. If the assumptions are not obvious then it is probably a good idea to state them clearly in the documents you submit. It is also ok to ask questions if you are not clear about some aspect of the restaurant's business. I (Professor Monroe) will play the role of the project sponsor (management) at Karwa. There is an assignment 2 clarifications wiki page on which I will answer questions. If you have a question or need clarification about how the taxi system works, or whether a proposed change to a business process is a good idea or not, post your question to the clarifications page and I'll answer it for all the groups at the same time.

Warning - I'm busy with things other than this IS project (I've got a taxi company to run!) so I may sometimes be slow to respond. I'm also easily confused by this Information Systems stuff so I might not be able to give you a very good answer. But I'll try to find time to answer questions when I'm not too busy working with the dispatchers and taxi drivers to keep things moving! Just don't bother me too much with the technical IT stuff. I'm good at running the taxi business but I hired you to do the IS stuff because I don't have that expertise. Be sure to use language that I can understand.

Scenario and background:
Karwa is a transportation company based in Doha, Qatar. The company provides many types of public transport, including buses and taxis. For this project we will be helping their taxi business connect more easily, quickly, and accurately with their customers. Karwa's value proposition is to provide efficient, timely, safe, and pleasant transportation to their customers at a reasonable price. This includes providing fast and accurate pickup and delivery service. Karwa taxis are very popular and at peak times there are often more requests for taxis than taxis available. Karwa occasionally has a demand mismatch problem in which they have taxis available and empty in one part of town while there is large demand for the taxis elsewhere, but none available. This situation both reduces Karwa's revenue and leaves their customers dissatisfied.

Additional challenges that Karwa must deal with include:
 * Karwa's customers and drivers speak many different languages, which sometimes causes difficulty in communication,
 * Streets, landmarks, and neighborhoods throughout Doha are frequently under construction, closed, rerouted, etc.,
 * There is not a consistently used naming and numbering scheme for streets and locations in the city. Many landmarks, roads, and neighborhoods are known by different names to different people.

Karwa management believes that they can address all of these problems, as well as providing a better overall customer experience, by allowing their customers to book a taxi in advance using their smartphones (iPhone, Android, or Blackberry) or a Karwa booking website. This booking functionality will complement (be in addition to) the phone based taxi booking service that Karwa already offers. To deal with language issues, the mobile apps and website will need to support multiple appropriate languages. To deal with the location issue, there should be multiple ways that customers can specify where they want to be picked up, and where they want to go, including a map-based option.

Your job for this project is to do the analysis for a new system that meets these business goals and to provide a set of deliverables (described below) for one of these four platforms.

The Karwa managers are not sure exactly how they will address these goals with their new system, but they are confident that a well designed booking system for the web and smartphones will help them do so. They are not sure exactly how they should make this new information system work, nor how, exactly they will need to change the taxi booking processes for the project to succeed. Your job is to help them to clarify how they will improve this business processes with an information system, identify key stakeholders that will be affected by this change, and begin the process of writing down specific requirements for the new system.

**Your task:**
In this assignment, your group will play the role of Karwa's IS Business Analysis team. Your group needs to to create a project abstract and a business process definition statement for the new taxi booking process, conduct a stakeholder analysis to identify three important stakeholder groups, and identify and document twenty important requirements that the new system must satisfy. Your analysis should identify some functional requirements and some quality attribute requirements.

Obviously, twenty requirements will not be sufficient to specify all of the requirements for a complex information system such as this one, so your analysis is not expected to be comprehensive. The requirements that you specify must, however, be important for the business and/or the system, and they must be well formed and stated.

As you write your requirements statements, remember that well-written requirements statement are:
 * Precise
 * Unambiguous
 * Limited and focused (one requirement per statement)
 * Actionable (able to be implemented in a system)
 * Measurable
 * Testable
 * Related to an identified business need
 * Defined at a level of detail sufficient for system design

Deliverables:
You will need to submit a single file in Microsoft Word or PDF format that contains your group's business process description, stakeholder analysis, and requirements analysis. This document must be submitted to Blackboard's Dropbox no later than the deadline of 10:30am on Tuesday, October 18.

This document should contain the following sections: > > You may use a hierarchy to clarify the details of each individual requirements if and where necessary but you do not need to do so for each individual requirement. You need to specify twenty requirements using the format describe in item 3 above. If you choose to group these requirements hierarchically you may do so, or you may make them all top-level requirements.
 * 1) **Project abstract and business process description**. In no more than two pages your group should describe, at a high level, how you propose changing Karwa's business processes with a new information system that allows customers to book a taxi in advance using **one** of the platforms identified (web browser, iPhone, Android phone, or Blackberry). Your abstract should describe the primary top-level goals of this project along with the major constraints under which it is to be undertaken. Your business process description should describe at a very high level how the new online booking system is supposed to work. You may use whatever format or technique you feel is appropriate. The purpose of this description is to allow the business and system analysts doing detailed requirements gathering to understand the overall system that you are proposing, as well as the people who need to design and implement the system.
 * 2) **Stakeholder analysis**. In this section of the document you need to identify three important groups of stakeholders for this project. For each of these groups you will need to (a) provide a name for them, (b) briefly describe who the members of the group are, and (c) briefly describe the outcome of the project that they need to consider it a success. The stakeholder analysis document should be no more than one page long. Choose what you include in this document for each group carefully.
 * 3) **Requirements specification**. In this section of the document you need to specify twenty well-written, precise requirements for the project. You should use the requirements specification format and criteria given in class. For each requirement, you should (a) state the requirement precisely and concisely, and (b) indicate which stakeholders are affected by this requirement.

Examples:
To help you get started, here is an example of a stakeholder identification statement and two requirements that these stakeholders need in the system.

< >

Grading Criteria:
There are 120 points possible on the assignment. I will use the following criteria when grading your submission:
 * Submitting your document on time and according to the submission and deliverables specification is worth 10 points.


 * Your abstract and business process description is worth 30 points, divided as follows:
 * Document is well written, professionally presented, proofread for grammar and spelling errors, and no longer than two pages total (10 points)
 * System abstract clearly identifies top-level business goals and the constraints under which the system is to be implemented (10 points)
 * Document clearly describes the new, or revised, business process that the system will need to suppor (10 points)


 * The stakeholder analysis is worth 20 points, divided as follows:
 * Appropriate stakeholder groups identified and all requested information provided for each of the groups (12 points total, 4 points per stakeholder group)
 * Stakeholder analysis is well written, professionally presented, proofread for grammar and spelling errors, and no longer than one page total (8 points)


 * The requirements specification is worth 60 points. Each of the 20 requirements you list is worth three points
 * Two points for a well written, precise, and concise statement of the requirement (a)
 * One point for an appropriate identification of the stakeholder groups affected. You only need to consider the stakeholder groups identified in your stakeholder analysis (b).

Statement on Collaboration:
The document you submit may be done individually, or in teams of two or three people. You may not work in teams larger than three people - if you have a group of more than three people who would like to work together you will need to break the group into separate teams.

You are free to discuss the assignment, the banks needs, stakeholders, and general ideas about the case and assignment with your classmates on other teams. Each team will, however, need to write and submit their own document. The document submitted needs to represent the work of the team submitting it - your team needs to synthesize the discussion and come to their own conclusions. In general, if you find that you are unable to come up with a different set of stakeholders or requirements from other classmates that you have discussed the assignment with, then you have probably done too much group work and not enough work on your individual team. If you find that you are just copying the ideas from another group then you have probably stepped over the line that separates a constructive discussion about the assignment from cheating.

The names of all team members should be on the single document that you submit. If your team has spent so much time discussing the case with another team that it is likely the instructor will be concerned about copying between the teams then you should list the names of the other people in the class with whom you have discussed the assignment as well. These people should be identified as participants in your discussions rather than team members. Those identified on an assignment only as participants will not be graded or get credit for that team's submission but they will also be much less likely to get in trouble for academic integrity problems if their participation is called out clearly in the submission.