Question

Congratulations! After presenting your proposal on mobile application in response to COVID-19 pandemic in front of investors, one of the potential investors is very keen on your project. However, the investor has asked you to speed up your project to be completed in 2 weeks, although you have planned a project duration of 3 months. Note that your total cost is around $100,000 and the investor is willing to cover the expenses for it. The investor has also asked you further questions regarding Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) life cycle standard and the user/customer satisfaction of your mobile application.
4.1 Provide a simple Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) of activities and a Gantt chart of your project which fits with Questions 2, 3 and 4.
[10 marks]
4.2 Figure out which activities you would like to crash in order to compress the duration of your project to 2 weeks. Explain how you chose these crashed activities in detail.
[5 marks]
4.3 Explain the ITIL lifecycle processes of your chosen project.
[5 marks]
4.4 List three best suited customer feedback questions when you launch your project.
[5 marks]

Answer 1

Creating a Covid-19 app in 2 weeks can be challenging. Because of this, we will only focus on the main features/activities of the app, being self-identification, and contact tracing.

Apart from this, we will also need a faster developmental architecture/language for the development which will speed up the process.

Let us assume that we will be using the following framework stack for the development of the Covid-19 mobile app:

1. Flutter for Mobile app development (Android and iOS)
2. Firebase Authentication for login
3. Firebase cloud firestore for the database
4. Firebase storage for storage
5. and Firebase cloud notifications for over the air push notifications.

Reasons for Choosing Flutter for development:

Flutter is a cross platform framework that let's you develop your applications in both Android and iOS using the same codebase. Flutter also has a hot reload feature that ships the new code to the device in a matter of seconds, which greatly improves the developmental speed.

Reasons for choosing Firebase as the backend:

As firebase and flutter go hand in hand, the integration process for Auhentication, database and storage is just a matter of hours.

Having this configuration will save months of developmental and set up time.

4.1 Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) of activities:

Gantt chart:

Explaination:

1. Deciding Project scope:
   1. Initially, we will have to decide the project scope before the design and development begins.
      1. For out project, we will be skipping "user interview" section, as this can take a long time, and we have the target audience already defined.
      2. Planning will include project and scope planning. What activities and features can we include, and which ones we will cross off for the initial MVP.
   2. Design and research
      1. We will do away with the creating user personas. Since we are not taking user interviews, creating user personas will not be possible.
      2. This can save us 5 to 6 days depending upond the number of users to be interviewed and questions.
      3. we will straight away begin with getting the wireframes ready for the bole app.
      4. Once the wirefeamres are finalised by the team. dsigners can create final high fiedality mockups to pass on to the developers
   3. Development
      1. This will include the development of all the core features including authentication, profile management, self identification and contact tracing.
   4. Q&A and Testing
      1. Once the development for the MVP is done, the build along with the documentation will be passed onto the testing team to do a overall testing of the design and all the edge cases.
   5. Re-Development
      1. After the Q&A team has been through their testing, developmental team will have to go over all the bugs and fix them.
      2. After all the bugs are fixed, the new build will again be passed on to the testing team (step 4) to retest the affected areas.
      3. If more bugs are found, the last twosteps (4 and 5) will be repeated in a loop till the app is bug free
   6. Deliverables
      1. As the app is not to be released (initially) but has to get investor's approval first, deployment is not included in the initial cycle.
      2. This again saves time deployment and hosting.

4.2 Figure out which activities you would like to crash in order to compress the duration of your project to 2 weeks. Explain how you chose these crashed activities in detail.

I would like to crash:

1. Initial User questionnaire: This is because interacting with a bunch of users and analyzing their feedback cannot be done in the given timeframe. Also, We do know the majority of the market state, and so do not have to redefine the target audience for this project
2. User Persona: In the same way, creating different user personas can take a while. For our current project, we only need to deliver an MVP, to the investor, as the market is already defined. Every potential user who is worried about their family is a target audience.
3. Covid 19 news: Many Covid 19 apps have this. Although, this is not the main USP for our app. Users will install out app for contact tracing, making Contact tracing the most valuable feature in the app. Adding an RSS news feed may not take more than a day, although testing lifecycle can make this a longer process.

4.3: ITIL lifecycle processes for this project will follow the standard process:

4.4: The three best suited customer feedback questions would be:

1. Would you be rather have an app monitoring your location at all the times to help you prevent going near the infected areas / people, or would you not risk your privacy?
   1. This Is the one question that can decide future conversion of the app at a large rate.
   2. From a developer point of view, we need to have location turned on at all the times to ensure the geographical trajectory of the user in order to trace the spread.
   3. Even if the use of location is limited and vital, it raises questions on privacy and can ultimately lead to uninstalls.
   4. In the future updates, we can certainly work to get the trust of our users by having their data downloadable / delectable.
2. Would you like to have the self identification optional or required?
   1. If self identification is required, many users who are not willing to comply may just uninstall the app, and look for another one.
   2. Many users may want to keep this feature as an absolute compulstion in order to make the tracking more accurate and everyone safer.
3. Would you recommend this app to your friends?
   1. This one worded question is asked in all the apps you come across, for important reason- it works.
   2. From the answer to this trend, we can figure out if the mass users are happy with the app or not.
   3. We can certainly follow this question up by "Why / Why not?".