Understanding

Arroyo Vista Housing of UC Irvine has 35 academic theme houses and Greek houses. The House Assistant of each house has to serve periodic duty days throughout the course of the year in different shifts. Their shifts will be assigned by the supervisors of the Housing. And that job has being done by hand for years. It is hard for the staff to have a fair schedule for all House Assistants, and to keep track of their duties. Also, it takes them a lot of time to do the job and to resolve the complaining of the House Assistants when they think they are not assigned fairly.

In order to avoid those problems, the Housing staff wants to have a system which has the following abilities:

To solve the problem, we will use some technologies such as

To understand the project, these following activities will be done

Technical Marketing Sheet

It is very difficult for a supervisor to make and distribute a yearly duty schedules fairly by hand for more than 35 House Assistant staff according to the complex rules mentioned in Background part represented by our client - Karyn Herrschaft, Residence Life Coordinator at Arroyo Vista Housing, UC Irvine. The unfairness issue when assigning these shifts among the House Assistant staff will be ultimately ended with the help of the Electronic House Assistant Scheduler (EHAS) program which is going to be carefully designed and developed by our professional software developer team – MONkEY. The MONkEY Team is well trained and experienced in this web application area; in fact, we did develop the Electronic Scheduler successfully last quarter and that system was evaluated highly among our competitors.

With the Electronic House Assistant Scheduler (EHAS), not only is the fairness problem being solved completely, but also the supervisor will definitely save a lot of time which he/or she used to spend for planing and making scheduling for each House Assistant.

The Electronic House Assistant Scheduler (EHAS) program will provide all necessary functionality and features required by the client – Karyn Herrschaft. The primary function of this program is receiving inputs such as the names and pertinent information at the beginning of the academic year from a professional staff member, then the program will generate a random duty schedule according to the specified rules. According to these rules, all shifts will be assigned fairly among the House Assistant staff yearly. Moreover, the program will have a friendly graphic user interface which include online help on how to operate the program. The Electronic House Assistant Scheduler (EHAS) will have all the required features follow:

The Electronic House Assistant Scheduler system will enforce a relatively fair and flexible schedule so that the supervisor could make change easily and effectively.

In addition, it saves time for the supervisor in making the duty scheduler as well as it is a very powerful tool to help the supervisor to do any necessary changes or update new information in the yearly duty schedule very fast. Furthermore, any duty person could remote access to the web home page to print out his/her exact update schedule.

The automated system (EHAS) will replace the old, time-consumed way of making yearly schedule by hand. The EHAS system will automatically generate yearly duty schedule for more than 35 house assistant staff in minutes if accepting the names and pertinent information as its inputs.

Besides all main functions and features required by the client – Karyn Herrschaft, Resident Life Coordinator of Arroyo Vista Housing, MONkEY Team will create a very friendly user interface which required almost no computer knowledge user and also include online help with complete guiding instruction on how to operate the program.

All schedule information will be publicly posting on your home web page, and they will be well organized in Schedule Menu which has several options that could lead the user directly to what he want to access, such as displaying daily, weekly schedules or searching for individual schedules by names, shift, workdays shift, work-night shift, holiday shift… Moreover, this system is absolutely Y2K compliance guarantee.

We, the MONkEY Team, would like to provide its client a prototype which can be used as the first version of the complete product, and we promise to deliver the Electronic House Assistant Scheduler system before the due date. In case, you want to make any minor changes in the system, add some more features or change any existing features as long as these changes support for your convenient and enhance your efficiency and fairness in assigning duty scheduling for your staff, the MONkEY Team will be very glad to do so if the time constraint is no matter.

Introduction

The process of solving the Electronic Housing Assistant Scheduler (EHAS) Project involves a number of different Phases, each of which contains a number of steps. We (Team E) are in Phase 0 now. Feasibility Study is the very first step we have done to obtain a better understanding of the project. One of the results of this step is to identify the major objectives of the Project, which are: