Project Assignment

Overview

For your course project, you will be working on a case study. The details are below.

The Client

Inisope, Inc. is the market leader in disposable dog rain coats. They come on a roll like baggies and use tabs (like diapers) to attach to the bottom of a dog's legs. They come in a variety of sizes. When you get back from the walk, you can simply throw it away with no smelly mess.

The Project

Inisope was founded by Austin Fichtner as a single person business run out of an apartment but has grown to over 2000 employees. However, their I.T. and internal processes have not kept pace with this growth and as a result are a patchwork of different systems and workflows. There are several opportunities for improvement but you'll need to talk to the client to find out just what they need.

The Team

Each team will consist of two members, the architect and the developer. The architect is the project lead and is responsible for project planning, budgeting, high-level design and direct contact with the client. The developer works with the architect on design details, converts functional requirements into a workable design and builds the system. As project lead you will be hiring a developer.

Your goal is to produce a pilot system for the client so they can decide whether to go to production. In addition to producing the desired functionality, you will need to estimate time and costs for a production system as well as hardware and software budgets.

NOTE: The architect bills at $150/hr. and the developer bills at $100/hr. You need to track the time each spends on project work so you can present the client with an itemized invoice upon completion.

Further Notes

Your instructor will be taking on the role of the client. With that in mind, when you email them any messages that are for the client should have a subject line that starts with #INISOPE to distinguish them from course-related emails. In addition, a portion of each week's Live Classroom will take the form of a weekly client meeting.

You will need to meet with your team at least once per week. This can be by phone, text messaging, video chat or whatever method works for you both as long as it takes place in real-time (i.e., not email).

Module Course Project- Architect - Modeling Transformation

You will need to lay out a strategic roadmap for Inisope. In addition to an executive summary and a conclusion, this document should cover at least the following:

• How to bring the employee directory to production, including adding features such as searching on multiple fields, adding an administrative page for updating records and exporting the results to different formats, such as a spreadsheet file. (Feel free to add your own ideas as well.)

• How Inisope can sell their product online. Note that this will tie into other process areas, such as using the employee directory information to route customer inquiries.

• Physical expansion - their business is growing and they'd like to grow with it but their internal communications don't easily scale up.

Submit a 3-5 page (not including title page and references) strategic roadmap document for Inisope.