Hello, My name is Luis and I'm having trouble assembling this project proposal. It is a Proof of Concept proposal and this is something that has never really been taught to us during instruction. My instructor told me my implementation and adoption sections need to be fixed and my problem significance is lacking. I'm not sure but I think the implementation section is basically my plan of action to complete the POC right? I am attaching the report below, please give me any advice on how I can fix those issues along with any other issues you may find. Thank you.

Problem Statement

Technology can be a wonderful and amazing thing.With the advancements over the years, connected devices have changed the landscape for both consumers and commercial users. Bandwidth has become quite important in recent years to keep these Internet of Things (IoT) devices communicating over the internet.Technicians have become an important component to keep the network infrastructure of all internet service providers (ISPs), such as, Comcast, Cox Cable, Charter Spectrum, HughesNet, and more operational and updated.Fiber optic and satellite internet have been hot topic issues to address the ever-growing need for bandwidth for both consumer and commercial use.

Unfortunately, due to union agreements, the author is not able to disclose the ISP referenced in this paper. Therefore, the name of the system for this report will be Technician Workflow (TWF).Mobile devices, such as smartphones and tablets, given to this ISP's technicians allow for network access network on the go.Although this may seem efficient, the truth is, in fact, quite the opposite.One problem with the TWF system is that its targeted audience is inexperienced technicians and forces all technicians, no matter how seasoned, to take unnecessary steps to complete vital work.This applies to all sections of work, such as, installation, repair, cable changes, assist tickets, and more.

Perhaps the best way to outline the severity of this problem is to put it into perspective. For example, a 30-year experienced technician picks up a repair ticket. TWF automatically connects to several various systems and begins to run their respective tests to "help" identify the problem and the system will spend about 10-15 minutes, depending on wireless signal and can be sometimes longer, running these tests and will not allow the technician to view any vital information to complete physical work in the meantime.The main issue here is that all technicians, no matter how experienced, have access to all these tests and their results separately in their own respective systems and usually run them when appropriate.Forcing a technician to wait for these tests to complete for simple jobs, such as, a modem swap, replacing a cable a dog chewed through, replacing an aerial cable that was damaged, or something else as simple as this is incredibly unnecessary and inefficient.To make matters worse, TWF will start to run these tests again before completing the ticket forcing technicians to again wait the 10-15 minutes, again it can be longer, before completing the ticket. Technicians have complained about wasting up to an hour just waiting on TWF to complete its testing to begin and completing the ticket resulting in a serious inefficiency problem.

Another problem TWF causes is a safety concern for technicians.If a technician needs to manually climb multiple poles to find and fix a cable issue, a technician was previously able to create an assist ticket for another technician with a crane truck to come and help and resolve find the issue quicker and safer.Muscle fatigue is a result of a technician manually climbing multiple poles in one day and is a symptom of exhaustion following an exercise or strenuous activities (Anthony, 2018). A technician can feel and become weaker causing the chances of an onsite accident to drastically increase.TWF automatically denies a technician to create a assist ticket if the results from the forced testing do not deem it so.If the service would run well for a certain amount of time, it would deny the creation of the ticket even though another system would show the pertaining service was completely out of service ten times in a week.

There are several other concerns regarding TWF, but these have risen the most concern by technicians as the most troublesome and used to outline the severity of the issue.Aside from technician complaints, technicians have begun to arrive late for scheduled appointments because of the inefficiency.Quality of work has also dropped due to technicians running behind schedule and missing appointments altogether.In fact, the appointment situation got so bad that picking up a 9 A.M scheduled appointment at 1 or 2 P.M was not uncommon.Which has led to a decline in customer satisfaction.

These were just a few examples of what the result of such a poor system project was.Unfortunately, this is not an uncommon practice for large businesses.A survey, relevant to this matter, involving various industries and their information systems revealed that 82% of employees suffer from poor productivity due to poor information management (Guta, 2019).Aside from the technician issues, the problem with TWF is that it is beginning to negatively affect all aspects of business.Customer satisfaction is important for customer retention and to attract new customers to other various services.Technicians continuously arriving late for scheduled appointments, poor work quality, and poor information management is impacting the organization in more negative ways than stakeholder realize.

Overview of Solution

For an organization to be efficient and effective in its respective industry, an alignment of Information Systems, Business Strategy, and Organizational Strategies can help it achieve success.This is known as the Information Systems Strategy Triangle.In other words, Information Systems should accompany Business and Organizational Strategies to reach intended goals (Pearlson et al., 2016).Which is clearly not the case when explaining TWF.Examples of negative TWF effects are customer satisfaction, work quality, and low employee morale.To better strike a balance within the strategy triangle for this ISP, a new system application should replace TWF to get their goals back on track.

An updated mobile system, either a mobile application or one that a web browser could access, would be a great solution to the negative issues the old system is causing.The average time it takes to develop an application that is compatible with both iOS and Android is 3 to 4 months.However, it is important to note that this time frame does not include time for project definition, stakeholder input, fact finding, and design stages.Capable teams, external variables, and engineering sequences are all examples of what could affect the timeline of a project (Moazed, n.d.).Since the timeline of an official project will surpass the length of this course, this project will be a Proof of Concept (POC) to provide proof of the validity of the new purposed system to stakeholders.The project success criteria will depend on if the POC indeed details the potential of the system and receives stakeholder approval.

If stakeholders approve this POC, an implementation plan should be ready to give the new project a quick start.Implementation best describes the installation of the new purposed solution. Adoption is an important aspect of implementation because it refers to the new system rollout throughout the organization ("Implementation vs. Adoption: How to Successfully Roll Out a New Technology Solution", 2018).Below are a few examples of steps that could help the implementation and adoption throughout the organization.

1.Stakeholder Support: Perhaps the most important factor of a new system implementation is the support from the organizational leadership. By properly informing upper management of the problem the new system will solve, the support to enforce its use will likely be great ("Implementation vs. Adoption: How to Successfully Roll Out a New Technology Solution", 2018).

2.Phase Map: By mapping the implementation phases, such as, initiation, installation, adoption, and maintenance, ensures a smooth system transition for the organization.This includes a timeline and budget map for progress tracking ("How to Approach Project Implementation", 2019). This is an example of the information inserted into the project WBS.Implementation and Maintenance are phases four and five of the SDLC and by having timelines mapped out, the Project Manager will have an easier time managing system implementation for the organization.

3.Employee Trainings: If employees are to successfully adopt the new system, they must first be shown how to use it.Employees need both time and support when being introduced to new software that impacts their work methods.Research has shown that proper system adoption is accompanied by ongoing leadership support ("How to Approach Project Implementation", 2019).

Methodology

The vision of this Proof of Concept (POC) project is to effectively demonstrate the need for a new system to the sponsor and to test the idea of what an increase to technician efficiency can do for the company within the timeline of this course.The following statements are the goals of this project and are in SMART format. To effectively communicate the need of the new system to the sponsor within the timeline of this course.To conduct the requirements gathering survey by March 20^th, 2021.To present the final deliverable to the sponsor before April 30^th, 2021.

If the POC project is a success, updated goals for the new system project can be "to increase technician efficiency by 10% and increase technician quality by 5% minimum within three months of launch" for the new system.Those numbers may seem a bit low, however, it is because of the way the company measures statistics.The system measures efficiency for a technician by the average time it takes to complete that specific job in comparison to the actual time it took the technician to complete it.For example, a technician picks up three different jobs in day and the average times on those jobs are 1.5, 4.0, and 2.0 hours, equaling 7.5 hours, but it took the technician 10 hours to complete all three tickets, that technicians efficiency for the day was 75%. The Quality metric goes by 30-day grace periods.If a customer calls in for a repair within 30 days of a technician's dispatch, that call negatively affects the quality metric.For example, if a technician completes 75 jobs in a month and gets 10 30-day callbacks, that technician's quality is 86.7%.

It would be difficult to understand how a system can help achieve greater efficiency without knowing what could help technicians perform their daily functions.The first method of this project would be to conduct a survey of the available technicians, within a certain timeframe, simply asking what their top three system improvement choices would be.However, it is also important to ask other end users, such as managers, their thoughts on the current program and their ideas for a new system.The culmination of the survey responses will count as the first deliverable.

Due to privacy concerns and the project leader not having manager level system access, it will be difficult to calculate an accurate Return on Investment (ROI) for this project.Instead, the additional average working hours each technician addresses will be count as a custom ROI."How much time do you waste sitting around waiting for the testing to complete?" will be an additional question to determine the custom ROI.To better determine just how much payroll TWF is wasting, an additional follow up question "how much more overtime hours have you been working since TWF launched?" will help determine a more accurate number.Proper analyzation of those additional questions will yield results and given as a deliverable to the sponsor by comparing how much an improved system will save on payroll.

The survey, custom ROI, and feedback from technicians regarding the visual diagrams best aligns with the Agile technique known as Scrum. Scrum will be the project management methodology this POC will follow because of the flexibility it offers.Due to the short timeline of this course, the Scrum technique, known as short intervals, lines up with submission points of this capstone (Torode, 2020).Feedback from drafts, or intervals, will help guide this POC project to the correct path to success.Resources necessary for project completion are all Microsoft programs and under the tools section.

Tools

To establish a timeline for this project, Microsoft Project will outline the work and create the work breakdown structure (WBS) with an associated Gantt chart.Given the timeframe of this course, April 30^th, 2021 will count as the delivery day for the final deliverable.This POC project is out to test the idea of how the new system can improve business operations by increasing technician output to determine if the project is feasible enough to fully develop a new system.Pacing the development process can help identify unforeseen risks or issues that can otherwise cause the project to fail.In doing so, this project will allow stakeholders to establish if the project is worth the investment by detailing the need for a new system project.Time will need to be allocated to administer the survey, creating example diagrams detailing how the New Workflow (NFW) will work, administer feedback from survey takers, and present for approval (Rodela, 2021).

Microsoft Visio will visually detail the system flow of the new purposed system to technicians.By physically seeing what prompts or steps should be in what order, technicians would have the opportunity to administer feedback about how they would like their new system to work or confirm if it is correct.Perhaps, even adding functions and abilities that were not previously available. These can act as new purposed system upgrades.For instance, a low bandwidth mode that would scale back animations, prompts, and videos while a technician is working in a poor coverage area allowing the technician to complete vital work quicker. Either Microsoft Power Point (PP) or Excel can aid in the demonstration of statistics to the sponsor. For instance, what the survey reveals to be the top system requests to allow a technician to be more efficient can either shown in a PP slide or Excel spreadsheet format. The same applies for the ROI outline.

This project proposal itself is a tool to discuss and outline the important factor of implications. Poor information quality can cost, on average, $9.7 million per year but also, loss of reputation and missed business opportunities can occur (Forbes, 2017).TWF has already been causing a significant drop in customer satisfaction by missing appointment times and poor service performance.Poor performance happens when the technician is trying to speed through their work because they are very behind schedule.If customers are not happy, the company will lose them to a competitor with a very slim chance of regaining that customer in the future.Which leads to a loss in revenue and a lot of missed opportunities.For instance, if that customer were satisfied, not only will the company have another monthly subscriber, but also would have another opportunity to sell that customer on additional services.Resulting in a revenue boost while maximizing business opportunities for each customer.

Requirements

In this case, the owner of this project would be both the sponsor and the ISP. All information gathered from the ISP for this POC is technically intellectual property.In some cases, both intellectual property and proprietary information are the same.The results of this POC would aid the sponsor to push upper management of the ISP to implement a new system project. Success criteria for this project will be based on satisfactory completion of the deliverables, satisfactory NWF slide confirmation by technicians, completed by the May 2^nd, 2021, and successfully demonstrates the need for a new system.System, or physical network, requirements will remain the same as TWF.This application may be one that is either a mobile application or one that a web browser could access.The new system must support a variety of web browsers if it is not a mobile application to ensure system versatility. Safari, Google Chrome, Firefox, and Internet Explorer are all examples of the various web browsers the system should support.

Technicians are currently using Apple devices but, however, there are a few who are using Samsung Galaxy Android devices. For Android devices, Android 8.1 or newer should be the operating system NWF supports.Google discovered several security flaws for Android 8.0 and 8.1 but since then have applied numerous security patches to improve OS security (O'Flaherty, 2020).For Apple users, iOS 13.7 should be the minimum OS NWF supports because it is the most current for older devices.On the hardware side, any devices that support the minimum OS requirements should be acceptable. iPhones 6s and newer, iPad (5^th Generation), iPad Air 2, iPad Pro (1^st Generation), and iPad mini 4 or newer are compatible iOS 13.7 devices (Neely, 2020). For the few Samsung users, only devices, such as, the first generation Note and S II or newer are devices that support Android 8.1 (Sahni, 2020).

Risks and Issues

Time is an issue, risk, or constraint that affects all manner of projects.If a project system launches too soon, the system may not perform as expected.If the system launches too late, the project maybe overbudget, may no longer be relevant to the organizational needs, or both.In this case, time is a constraint because of the lack of experience this project manager has.Moreover, lack of experience is another contributing constraint for this project. Performing a lot of research is necessary to correctly perform this POC but unfortunately, the remaining timeline for this course is seven weeks.Which can be extremely stressful for unexperienced students.The following is a list of risks and issues that can or are currently happening with this project.

Little Manager Support: Required manager level support is necessary to get information about TWF.Managers have access to data that is essential to this POC, such as, data shown in the gap analysis.Unfortunately, it did take quite a bit of time to get the data regarding the gap analysis from an available manager.Managers seldom show up at the garage due to mobile devices given to them to perform their work remotely.This may also be a risk when gathering requirements from end users.

Unable to Establish a Proper Reporting Section:The ISP that owns TWF is a multibillion-dollar company that has a dedicated IT department and may not listen or care to take ownership of this project.When composing this proposal, it was difficult to determine how to satisfy this section of work. The question then became, who should receive this data?Fortunately, the project manager was able to find a sponsor for this project. The project manager will be reporting to his supervisor at least once a week via phone call and in person meetings will be every two weeks to present progress.

Survey Time: When administering the survey, technicians may be too busy to fully answer the survey questions when the project manager is available.This fact alone may hinder this POC's ability to truly make a positive impact on all stakeholders including end users.The same applies for gathering feedback for NWF Visio diagrams for end user confirmation.

No Budget: Nominally, project managers will list a rate for themselves, vendors, services, and any other resources necessary to complete the project.However, there is no associated cost for this project due to the nature of this POC.Programs, methods, and actionable time to compile this POC is schoolwork and done during down time at work.

Gap Analysis

Below is a Visio diagram that demonstrates the metrics between the previous system, TWF, and the metric goals set forth by the company.Company targeted metrics will also represent the goals for the NWF.As shown in the figure below, average team efficiency has dropped 22.2% year-to-date when compared to the last year the previous system was in service. Quality and customer satisfaction both dropped 10.5% and 16.5% respectively.The diagram entails a steep drop in technician performance and ties into the problem significance of sections one and two.

(FIGURE WOULDNT PASTE SORRY)

Compliance

NWF must follow the same legal and ethical concerns that pertain to data access, privacy, and security.One of the biggest laws that the new system should abide by is the Unlawful Access to Stored Communications Act.This law regulates the access criteria to all privacy information the organization stores ("Unlawful Access to Stored Communications", n.d.).TWF and the new system has direct access to sensitive information of consumers and employees, such as, account numbers, addresses, full names, email, contact, and may others.The new system still must regulate who has access to this information and must follow Information Assurance practices to not allow unauthorized users to access it unless there is an operational need.

The Federal Information Management Security Act (FISMA) is another equally important law that the new system should follow.FISMA defines the guidelines and security practices for government agencies and their third-party vendors. This law mandates practices that cover Risk Management, Baseline Controls, Well Documented Security Controls, Annual Reviews, and Security Monitoring (Gillis, 2020).The ISP discussed in this document provides services to numerous State and Federal agencies, such as, offices and schools.It is crucial that the new system is in full compliance with this law and all its practices.

This project will follow strict ethical considerations when gathering feedback and survey responses.Respecting the right to privacy of everyone, including the ISP, indicates that documents will have sensitive information omitted.Private conversations, either by telephone or in person, is the method of choice for administering the survey.However, feedback from NWF slides can be in groups, when possible, to encourage more engagement from employees.Thus, ensuring a compliant and ethical practice for this project.

Adoption Plan

Some POCs are not about delivering a prototype concept program but detailing the feasibility of the purposed solution.In doing so, the project manager can confidently deliver a project that will not only improve the current situation but also aid in the achievement and improvement of business objectives. (Rodela, 2021).For this POC to be successful, this project will present some detailed system visualizations to technicians to describe the functionality of NWF sometime after the survey is complete on March 20^th, 2021.Information regarding technician satisfaction and engagement during the project will be part of the final deliverable.Information on lessons learned will help the project manager to better understand what approaches or steps should change for the next project (Lange, 2017).Due to the unusually large size of the ISP and the short timeline of the semester, the adoption goal is to encourage the sponsor to speak on behalf of the project manager and technicians to upper management to get a new system project underway.