Assignment+2+-+Quick+n+Tasty

** Due date: 17:00 hours on Thursday, October 7, 2010 **
Assignment #2 clarifications page

Overview:
In this assignment you will work as an IS Business Analyst who has been tasked with conducting a small-scale stakeholder and requirements analyses for Quick n' Tasty, a chain of restaurants located in Doha. You may work on the assignment individually, or in teams of 2 or 3 people. You will produce a business process description, a stakeholder analysis document, and a requirements analysis document that lists 20 carefully specified requirements. The description of the restaurant, the details regarding the IS project, and what exactly the restaurant owner and 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 owner and managers of the restaurant chain) to 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 them 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 restaurant owner and management. 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 restaurant 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 restaurant to run!) so sometimes I will 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 yelling at the cook and the waitstaff in the kitchen...

Scenario and background:
Quick n' Tasty is a chain of five restaurants located in Doha Qatar. Quick n' Tasty (QnT) offers both sit-down restaurant service and curbside take-away service at each of the restaurants. As their name indicates, the restaurant's value proposition is to provide good food and very fast service. The restaurants are very popular and during the dinner rush they often have a line of people outside waiting for a table and a dozen or more cars idling outside the take-away curb waiting to place an order or receive their food.

The QnT managers have created such a successful restaurant that they are having trouble keeping up with demand and serving customers quickly enough. They have even begun to hear stories from some of their customers that they are not coming to QnT as often because of the crowds, lines, and amount of time they need to wait to get a table or their order. Some disgruntled (former) customers have even taking to calling the restaurant 'Slow n' Tasty'.

This is, all things considered, a good problem to have but it is still a problem. The owner and managers have been putting significant energy into trying to figure out how to best address the issue. They have considered expanding the buildings and parking lots housing their restaurants but that is not realistic in most of their locations. They have considered adding more restaurants, but that is both very expensive and they have not been able to find good new locations that are available for rent. At the end of their analysis, they have decided that they need to move customers through the restaurant more quickly, for both sit-down and take-away. They have asked your team, their IS Business Analysts to propose a way that they can use an information system to handle the food ordering and delivery process much more efficiently so that they can move more customers through the restaurant(s) each evening, and also increase the number of take-away orders they can process each evening during the dinner rush.

In the restaurant managers' analysis, they need to focus on reducing the amount of time it takes to complete three important business processes:
 * 1) The time between when a group of customers arrive and when they are seated (when there are more customers than tables)
 * 2) The time between when a table of customers first sits down at their table and when their food arrives.
 * 3) The amount of time that drivers need to wait at the curb to receive their take-away orders.

They are not sure exactly how they will improve each of these processes, but they are sure that some combination of a more efficient ordering process by the customer, using mobile devices effectively, providing electronic and/or online menus, having a central system to tie them all together, and possibly providing the ability for customers to order what they want //before// arriving at the QnT will improve throughput. They are not sure what combination of these ideas they should use, or how, exactly they will change their processes to get the efficiency they feel they need. Your job is to help them to clarify how they will improve these 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 QnT's IS Business Analysis team. Your group needs to to create a business process definition statement for the new restaurant processes, 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 17:00 hours (5:00pm) on Thursday, October 7.

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 provide twenty 'top-level' requirements.
 * 1) **Business process description**. In no more than one single-spaced page your group should describe, at a high level, how you propose changing the restaurant chain's business processes with a new information system to increase the number of customers that each restaurant can serve each night, and how quickly each customer can be served. You may use whatever format or technique you feel is appropriate. The purpose of this description is so that the business and system analysts doing detailed requirements gathering will understand the overall system that you are proposing, as will 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, (c) briefly describe their key objectives with respect to the project, and (d) the outcome from the project that they need for the project to be considered 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, (b) indicate which stakeholders are affected by this requirement, (c) indicate whether the requirement is a functional requirement, a quality attribute (non-functional) requirement, or some combination thereof.

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.

**//Stakeholder example//**:

 * Group name**: Take-away customers.
 * Description**: This group of QnT customers drive to QnT and get their food but do not eat their food in the restaurant.
 * Key objectives**: This group wants to pick up their food as quickly and easily as possible, without having to wait or navigate a traffic jam in the parking lot.
 * Successful outcomes**: This group will consider the project a success if the system allows them to get their correct order quickly, easily, and with a minimum of waiting or hassle.

**//Requirement examples//**:
//Requirement//: The Quick n' Tasty iPhone app will allow customers to view the QnT menu on their iPhone. //Affected stakeholders//: QnT customers, restaurant managers who make menu changes, QnT IT staff. //Requirement type//: functional, business

//Requirement//:

//Affected stakeholders//: QnT customers, restaurant staff who cook and deliver orders, QnT IT staff. //Requirement type//: functional, business
 * The Quick n' Tasty system will be able to receive take-away orders by text message 24 hours per day.
 * If the restaurant is not open for business when the order is received, the system will automatically respond to the sender with a text message saying that the restaurant is currently closed, and listing the hours that the restaurant is open for business.

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 business process description is worth 25 points, divided as follows:
 * Document is well written, professionally presented, proofread for grammar and spelling errors, and no longer than one page total (10 points)
 * Document clearly describes the new, or revised, business process that the system will need to suppor (15 points)


 * The stakeholder analysis is worth 25 points, divided as follows:
 * Appropriate stakeholder groups identified and all requested information provided for each of the groups (18 points total, 6 points per stakeholder group)
 * Stakeholder analysis is well written, professionally presented, proofread for grammar and spelling errors, and no longer than one page total (7 points)


 * The requirements specification is worth 60 points. Each of the 20 requirements you list is worth three points
 * One point 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).
 * One point for correctly identifying whether it is a business or system requirement, functional or non-functional requirement, or some combination thereof (c).

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.