FOR COMPUTER SCIENCE ONLY

Business Requirements Document

Charles Tinsley

Dr. Mark Cohen

CIS 599

July 28, 2019

Business Requirements Document

Providing better services to customers is one of the keys to a successful business. Fulfilling customer’s requirements helps achieve customers satisfaction; an important tool that drives the business towards achievement. Customers’ requirements are those needs that determine whether or not the customer needs have been satisfied with the products. According to Spacey (2017), a customer requirement is a specification that originates with customers as opposed to internal stakeholders. This can include both functional and non-function requirements for products, services and experiences.

Definition of the Scope and how to Control the Scope of the Project

After brainstorming and interviewing customers, there was a need to implement the voice of a customer in the business. Voice of the customer involves capturing customer’s needs and expectations before coming up with a product, services, and brands. According to Saeed et al. study (2013), Innovation and new product development connected with “customer needs and expectations” differs across the marketing, engineering, and industrial design literature. The goods in the market are of a high quality due to the customer’s input during production. Customers know what they want. Therefore, involving them during production ensures that the goods produced to meet their needs. This business aims at providing customers with better services and products. Therefore, ensuring that customers are satisfied by getting their feedback can be used as a control to using Voice of Customers. Assessing increase in profits will also help define whether this strategy is working.

Feedbacks and profits realized after the implementation of Voice of Customer (VoC) will use as a way to realize workability of this scope. Positive feedbacks from customers will mean that their needs have been fully satisfied. However, negative feedbacks will mean more has to be done. Better strategies will have to be implemented to ensure mass satisfaction of the customers. When balancing the books of account, the profits increase that will be realized after the implementation of VoC will mean success in the strategy. However, no profits or losses will be linked to the failure in workability of the strategy.

Possible Risks, Constraints, and Assumptions

This strategy has four distinct components, namely; Listening (collecting data), understanding (analyzing data for insights), sharing (distributing the insights), and taking action. Having all the four components to work will involve using a lot of resources from the company. The risks associated will be getting individualized needs from the customers. Every customer has his/her needs. It will be therefore, hard for the analyzers to determine the need that will be likely to cause customers’ satisfaction and achieve business goals. This will mean adopting production strategies that may fail during the process leading to losses. As this scope is limited only to customers’ feedback, there will be a lack of consultation from other external consultants. This strategy risks succumbing to analysis paralysis as the business tries to ensure profits are realized. We have to assume that the feedback we get always aims at improving the customers’ needs.

Integration with Other Systems and Infrastructure

There is a need to integrate VoC with Database and Data Warehousing, Cloud Technology and Virtualization, and Network Infrastructure and Security to easily monitor its workability. In other words, we are going to integrate VoC with cloud infrastructure. According to Gilbert (2018), this will virtualize all the resources to make them available on the website of the company using the command line interfaces, program interfaces, and graphical interfaces. The cloud infrastructure will enable customers’ and the project team to see the utilized resources and the corresponding resources to the costs of the project. This will also ensure they can monitor the achievements of the strategy.

The cloud storage infrastructure will also integrate software and hardware elements that will reinforce the public and private cloud storage services. The company will also use a virtual integration of the infrastructure and other systems. In this case, the subsystems will be assimilated based on the operation ability of the information systems that are related to the functional entities. This is one of the quickest available methods that will be used with the network developers and vendors. There is a need to come up with security measures to ensure the protection of the company’s network. This will enable information relayed from customers to the company and from the company to the customers are not distorted hence efficient data flow.

Human Capital

According to Pettinger (2017), Human Capital is a measure of the skills, education capacity, and attributes of labor, which influence their productive capacity and earning potential. We are planning to add up our task force to involve employees who have prior knowledge of VoC. Kaplan & Norton (2005), emphasizes that if the employees who are closest to customers and who operate processes that create value are unaware of the strategy, they surely cannot help the organization implement it effectively. There will need to find individuals who have worked in another organization that had implemented VoC to help train some of our employees.

The company will develop a human capital planning tool that will be employed to drive focused activities and achieve the goals of the project (Wang, 2018). This plan will comprise of software developers, web designers, virtual engineers, and IT professionals that will enable the company to assess, plan, and react to the needs of the project effectively. These professionals will be highly skilled with great educational and work experience from reputable organizations. These professionals will help redesign the organization by developing a plan that meets the needs of the organization as well as the goals, mission, and vision of the company.

Possible Outsourcing or Offshoring Needs for Accomplishing the Project

The information flow between the customers and the company will involve a lot of traffic. Therefore, it is advisable for the company to outsource storage facilities rather than buying and maintaining the storage devices at the company to reduce expenditure. The employee will have training from international organizations, as VoC has never been implemented by the company before. The company will also apply the offshoring needs such as keeping the service desk in different countries so to ensure customers’ feedbacks are received. This will also ensure that those who seek the company’s products get first-hand information about the products.

Relevant Terms Used Throughout the Project

Some of the terms that would be used throughout the project implementation include project initiation, management information system, and project scope, feedbacks, among others (Said, 2018). Project initiation is the initial phase of the project in the life cycle of project management. It encompasses launching a new project. During this phase, employees will have to be trained, and all the requirements put in place. VoC will then be first implemented. Management Information System (MIS) will be used to manage the information flow throughout the company. Project scope is the determination of the deliverables of the project, including the goals and the objectives of the project, the costs, the tasks, and the schedule of the project. Feedbacks from customers will form a base at which information about reactions to a product, a person's performance of a task will be used to determine better ways for improvement.

Cost Projections for Staffing, Infrastructure, and Other Resources

There will be costs needs that we have to budget for. First of all, there will be a need to determine the amount of labor needed. This includes all the staff, trainers, and other specialists that will be hired. Equipment for use and facilities to house service desks in different countries will be needed. There is also a need to add contingency costs for additional expenses that cannot yet be foreseen. Labor costs for 50 staff, 3 trainers and 20 specialists will approximate to $500000. Specialists include IT personnel, data analyzers, software developers, web designers, and virtual engineers. Equipment and facilities in 10 countries that will first launch the strategy will be about $600000. A contingency cost of $100000 will also be required. Approximately, the whole project will cost 1.2 US Dollars.

References

Gilbert, T., Barr, S., James, P., Morley, J., & Ji, Q. (2018). Software Systems Approach to Multi-Scale GIS-BIM Utility Infrastructure Network Integration and Resource Flow Simulation. ISPRS International Journal of Geo-Information, 7(8), 310.

Spacey, John. (2017). 4 Types of Customer Requirements. Simplicable. Retrieved From https://simplicable.com/new/customer-requirements

Kaplan, S. Robert, Norton, P. David. (2005). The Office of Strategy Management. Harvard Business Review. Retrieved From https://hbr.org/2005/10/the-office-of-strategy-management

Pettinger Tejvan. (2017). Human Capital Definition and Importance. Economics. Retrieved From https://www.economicshelp.org/blog/26076/economics/human-capital-definition-and-importance/

Rashid Saeed, Rab Nawaz Lodhi, Jazba Munir, Shazza Riaz, Fareha Dustgeer & Amna Sami. (2013). The Impact of Voice of Customer on New Product. World Applied Science Journal. 24(9): 1255-1260, 2013. Retrieved From https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/a7bc/9f0c4ea9c7bda5b648e25550938c58ccfb09.pdf

Saidi, S., Kattan, L., Jayasinghe, P., Hettiaratchi, P., & Taron, J. (2018). Integrated infrastructure systems—A review. Sustainable Cities and Society, 36, 1-11.

Wang, Y., Liu, Y., & Canel, C. (2018). Process coordination, project attributes, and project performance in offshore-outsourced service projects. International Journal of Project Management, 36(7), 980-991.