Background

You are a systems analyst working for Laggard, Inc. (Laggard), a wholesale distributor of bulk vitamins and fine chemical food additives. Laggard has stayed way behind the IT industry evolutionary curve. The company relies on a software suite they developed more than 40 years ago. You have convinced the Laggard management to investigate replacing this legacy software before the hardware on which it runs can no longer be repaired.

You think the system at greatest risk for failure is the order processing system. Here is how it works today. A bank of telephone operators takes sales order calls from customers, transcribes the orders onto coding forms, and sends them to the keypunch department for encoding. During the night shift, computer operators run batch jobs to read in the orders, check customer credit, and print stock pick lists for those customers with good credit. If the batch jobs detect problems with customer identification, shipping addresses, credit, or any other issue, the errors print on an order reject report that is routed to sales, order processing, and inventory managers for review and resolution. Pickers, packers, and shippers annotate the pick list report that is used as a turnaround source document for updating inventory, customer records, and accounts receivable.

Laggard’s aging software development team is nearing retirement. However, the members are still available to answer questions about the existing order processing solution. Relevant business people from the sales, order processing, and inventory management teams are also available to you.

Assignment

To get the modernization ball rolling, you will gather requirements for a new order processing solution, structure the requirements, and ensure they are correct. In addition, you will expose Laggard to web-based applications and mobile computing access. You are eager to get started, before the software team retires and the aging hardware fails. Here are your deliverables for this assignment:

Produce a legacy system replacement Baseline Project Plan (BPP) for Laggard. Begin with gathering and structuring requirements and end with a web-based order-processing prototype. Make note of the business and technology roles that will participate in various phases of the project, and be sure to include multiple review cycles for requirements review.