Question: Suppose that you and two or three other students have decided to start a business that offers landscaping services. Your goal is to develop a list of clients for whom you provide regular and recurring services, such as mowing, weeding, and pool cleaning, as well as one-time specialty services, such as pruning, garden preparation, tree removal, sprinkler installation and repair, and the like. You know that it will be critical for your success to have an information system for tracking customers, services you have provided, and services you are scheduled to provide in the future. As a new small business, you want a simple and affordable system based on Excel or Access. You name your new system GardenTracker.
Form a team of three or four students and, given what you know about lawn and garden maintenance and your intuition and business knowledge, complete the following tasks:
1. Explain how you would use the SDLC to develop GardenTracker.
2. Define the scope of your system.
3. Explain the process you would use to determine the feasibility of GardenTracker. List data you need for such an assessment, and explain how you might obtain or estimate that data.
4. Consider just the tracking of recurring services, and list all of the requirements that you can imagine for that functionality. Be specific and answer at least the following:
a. What data will you need?
b. How will you input that data? Show a mockup of a data entry screen, and describe how it will be used.
c. Using your mockup, describe how you will modify recurring service data.
d. Using your mockup, describe how you will cancel a recurring service.
e. Specify any other requirements you believe are important for tracking recurring services.
5. Present your answers to item 4 to the rest of the class and obtain feedback from your classmates.
6. Modify your answer to item 4 based upon feedback you received in item 5.
7. Considering just the recurring services functionality, do you think it would be better to use Excel or Access for this project? List the criteria you used to answer that question. Summarize the consequences of making a poor choice between these two products.
8. What does this short exercise tell you about information systems development? Answer this question in such a way that you could use your answer to demonstrate your critical-thinking skills in a job interview.