INF80001- Advanced Business Analysis - Business Analysis at Prestige University - The Accommodation Problem - Business Assignment Help

INF80001: Advanced Business Analysis Assignment Help

Assignment Task:

Assignment Details
The assignment is based on two documents, Prestige University, Parts 1 and 2, contained within this document, and Webinar Transcript: Doing your PhD at Prestige University. The assignment is comprised of a number of sequential parts, detailed below. You are to write a Business report in which you address each of these parts. Please ensure you number each part of the final report.

Focus on the problem in the Research Office that is an integral part of Prestige University.

(i) Your task is to analyze the current situation to determine the business needs for the Research Office. You should perform a document analysis to do this. Please explain and/or justify the business needs you identify, and write the business requirements.

(ii) As part of your business analysis, you decide to interview some of the key stakeholders in the Research Office. Write detailed interview protocols for Prof Ru Shi Liu and Katie Brennan.

(iii) Relying on information obtained from the document analysis, and that which might be conceivably be obtained from your planned interviews with stakeholders, write formal user requirements. Demonstrate how these user requirements are in scope and aligned with the business requirements

(iv) Outline a proposed solution (a solution requirements document) that outlines a system to support the management of the PhD process. Show the proposed process, and discuss the ways that the Research Managers and Research Administrators (Shah Miah, Katie Brennan, and Rajiv DeSouza) will interact with the system. Explain how your proposed solution with meet business needs, alleviate existing problems in the Research Office, and how value will be delivered to the business. (In writing your response here, you should bear in mind that your aim is to get the stakeholders

Prestige University (Part 1: The Accommodation Problem)

Jim Maxwell, the Vice-Chancellor (VC) of Prestige University sighed deeply, and resisted the temptation to put his legs up on his expansive, polished oak desk to relax just for a moment. On the one hand, he knew there were a lot of good things happening at Prestige. Student enrolments had risen again this semester, and much to his delight, so had PhD student enrolments, both domestic and international. Research output had also grown steadily in the three years since he had been appointed VC. So why did it feel as though there were urgent problems cropping up all over the place? It must be 3 months since the new system Uni1 had been implemented. Uni1 was supposed to fix all the operational problems of Prestige...well, that’s what the CIO and the Pro-Vice-Chancellor (PVC) told him before he agreed to go to the Board and ask for the eye-watering amount of money required to fund it. The Board had agreed, somewhat to his surprise, and even he had to admit that the CIO and PVC had presented a very compelling presentation that night. He wasn’t especially IT savvy, but the CIO had painted this attractive proposition of a single, integrated system to run the entire university’s operations. Except Uni1 didn’t! It seemed that Uni1 had solved only some of the operational problems.

His shoulders slumped as he recalled his next meeting, with Bethany Wise, Head of the Student Accommodation Office. In his days as the Dean of the Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences he had always admired Bethany’s work, and found her an easy person to work with on a number of student accommodation related issues. That now seemed a long time ago. A quiet knock on the door, and his Executive Assistant ushered Bethany into his office. He was shocked when he saw her. She looked nothing short of exhausted. Bethany waved away his offer of coffee, and launched a tirade...about Uni1. Bethany reminded him that one of Prestige’s sources of competitive advantage over its rivals was its commitment to providing accommodation for all incoming students as required. Prestige had a number of beautiful old
Colleges on campus, but these were quite expensive and could not cater for all students. In addition, Prestige had effectively rented a local apartment block, which was then sub-let to students. They had developed close relationships with landlords of many houses nearby, who had agreed (with some financial incentives from Prestige) to rent out their properties to students during semester time, but were free to rent to tourists during non-teaching periods. And Bethany was well-connected with the local community, often calling in favors when additional accommodation was required at short notice.

The VC gleaned from Bethany’s impassioned words that there were a number of new issues. Firstly, apparently in determining requirements for Uni1, the BAs had been told that the Student Accommodation Office was not core business, and so no one had been near Bethany or her staff to either inform them about the project or to find out whether or not they might be able to benefit from the new system. They were drowning under a mountain of paperwork and Excel spreadsheets, and as student numbers grew, the pressure on the Student Accommodation Office grew as well, with no increases in staff. “Surely,” Bethany said, “someone could have come and developed or obtained a system that would help them manage the accommodation process? Not core business? Not important? Didn’t they realize that providing accommodation was one of Prestige’s catchcries?” The VC made a mental note to investigate if this claim could possibly be true, and wondered if the CIO was still on campus
today. “But that’s not all”, exclaimed Bethany. “Most of our landlords have discovered Airbnb clients will pay more than students, and with the increase in tourism to this area and our proximity to the city center, the landlords are increasingly subletting to AirBNB. I’ve talked to the CFO and said we needed to pay the landlords more as an incentive to stick with us, and not accept Airbnb bookings. But the CFO refused to budge and said we were not paying them another cent. It’s week 3, and we are still not able to accommodate all students who have requested.

assistance. I have a PhD student and her family sleeping on couches at my home!” And then came another killer blow to the VC. “Jim, you and I go back a long way and I know that you know how important it is to our reputation to provide accommodation. Why weren’t we included in the last round of strategic planning, when you and the other Execs decided on these ambitious plans to expand student numbers? Students are getting really upset and planning to go to other universities, especially those located in cheaper suburbs. My staff are doing their best, but now I have two off on stress leave as they could no longer cope with upset students and upset landlords, who felt the university was being very intransigent towards them after 15 years of their loyalty to us.”

Jim felt metaphorically battered, but realized something had to be done. He tried to smile confidently as he shook Bethany’s hand and escorted her out of his office. As he was about to shut his door, his EA said “Jim, the PVC Research Degrees has phoned a few times, wanting to talk to you. Her group are not coping with all the additional research student enrolments, and she wants to talk to you about increasing her budget to take on more staff and some ideas she has had for a system to be developed to help the management of the Research student process from application through to graduation.

Part 2: The Research Office at Prestige University

Jim clicked on the link to the webinar1 that Prof Ru Shi Liu had sent to him. Ru Shi was the new PVC Research degrees at Prestige University, and she had been expressing concerns about them pressures in her office, especially since the rapid increase in both local and international PhD student numbers. He had just finished a long conversation with Ru Shi, and five minutes into the webinar, he had seen enough to realize that there were lots of documents associated with PhD students that needed to be managed. In their conversation, Ru Shi had complained that their office was run using standalone excel spreadsheets. Each faculty (five in total) used to
have a Faculty Manager, who looked after all PhD students in that faculty. A year or so ago, they had each been physically located in their own faculty, and so were closely involved with the PhD students and their supervisors, and were knowledgeable about the particular needs of students in their own faculties. A review undertaken at the time of the implementation of Uni1 had recommended the Research Managers all relocate and physically sit together in the Research Office, as this was argued to offer efficiencies and create more standardized processes and practices in managing the PhD program. Two of the Research Managers promptly left their jobs, and the previous PVC Research degrees (Kerry White) did not replace them, believing that the efficiencies gained would not necessitate replacing them. As part of
the restructuring, other research administrators (RAs) took on certain aspects of the jobs of the Research Managers, with Shah Miah taking over all matters to do with Research Ethics, Katie Brennan looking after the annual review processes, and Rajiv DeSouza taking on examinations. While Ru Shi quite liked having the Research Managers all together, and felt that communication amongst them had improved, she had heard reports that PhD students now felt it was difficult to find their Research Managers, and found it very difficult to get answers to questions as they were never sure whether they should contact Shah, Katie, Rajiv, or the Research Manager. Further, it seemed that there was a growing distance between the Research Managers on the one hand, and supervisors and students in the Faculties. The
Research Managers themselves acknowledged that with their vastly increased workloads, matters such astimely submission of forms, updating of the supervisor register spreadsheet, and maintaining all the documents and records of the PhD review processes and the like was becoming a nightmare.

Jim glanced at the time on his phone, and saw he needed to leave to meet up with a long- standing colleague and friend Prof Roger Sor. Roger had a very dry sense of humour which usually cheered Jim up, but as they were queueing at the buffet for lunch, Roger looked at him and said: “Jim, I reckon you might need to have look at what is going on in the Research Office. I’ve been trying to change the supervisory panel for one of my PhD students for the past 9 months, and no matter how many times I send through the form, and send emails informing them of the change, nothing happens...no change is ever recorded. You tell us all to take more PhD students, but there doesn’t seem to be any systems whatsoever to manage the PHD process. I was chairing a review panel last week, and no one in the Research Office
seemed to have any idea where I could find a copy of the previous review documents for that student. Bit embarrassing really...had to email the student and ask him to send me a copy. Surely we should be keeping these on record?” Jim knew he could always rely on Roger to add to his troubles. Back in his office, he picked up the phone and called Ru Shi...”OK, we need to do something about this. Can you get one of the Business Analysts to come in and have a look at the problems and what we need to do about them? I’ll talk to the CFO about finding a budget for this work”.

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