Assigment on Project Development and Implementation for Strategic Managers

Introduction:

We live in modern era where technology is being used in various ways to make our life easy and favourable. There are lot of modern amenities like television, radio, computer, satellite communication, robotics, modern medical instruments, online shopping. Now there are two kinds of shopping; offline or direct shopping and online shopping.
Previously people normally went to market or shopping centre, look around the market and choose their products and bargain to salesman regarding the product price, they can touch their products and carried home with them. By from the last decade there are some short of shopping which called online shopping where a lot of products are available on the websites, people can choose from the product list, they can compare prices and quality, then they pay the money online and the product will reach the proper destination according to the time stamp. Product information and customer reviews are vital issue in online shopping because customers give emphasis on those. Like if they looking for cameras there are hundreds and thousands of cameras in online, and then they will look for product information and customer review which will help them to choose the best product as they are looking for. Normally product information and customer review are given at the bottom of the page, but here my project is those information will provide first, then product picture which help customers to take decision easily. Here I will develop the project specification, then designs the project, then implement the project then measure the outcomes and later I will discuss how to improve the outcomes.

1Be able to develop a project specification

1. Analyse the factors that contribute to the process of project selection

   
   
   The aim of my project to make online shopping easy to use and hassle-free by providing adequate and proper product information and customer reviews. It is shown in research that online customer product review has a great influence in online product purchasing sometimes it increases sales up to 20 percent. For that reason most of the companies provide a choice to customers to give opinion regarding the product which is helping to increase their sell. Sometimes for reviewing the customer’s comments, customers need to visit various website which consume too much time. This website will give ten to thousands of product reviews from various website in a single place so it will save customer’s times. The IExploreReviewss give lot of opportunities to customers as it is very simple and very easy to access, customers need only the basic internet browsing knowledge and they can do their product research over here. There are some website who provide customer reviews with a wider capacity but they charge for the service but our website and service is completely free and user friendly. I choose this project to make online shopping easier and make a proper and qualified decision regarding a product in a short time. [1]

2. Develop outline project specifications for the implementation of a new product, service or process

   
   

   Project outline

   
   

   Project name: Online shopping IExploreReviewss system

   
   

   Description of activities:

   1. The main goal of this project are mentioning below:
      • The website which will provide user experience and finally they will help to a customer to make a decision.
      • The User interface will be simple, concise and clear, with latest up-to-date info using the user language.
      • All the information will present in such way user can make choices, all the data will be analyzed and filtered.
      • All the data will be transparent and it will show the reference websites
      • Offer a motivation for the client to save his time and feel confident to make a purchasing decision.
        
        
   2. We will do the assessment first which includes informal interviews, finding and contextual inquiry, then we design our websites, then we implement the project and last we will determine the usability of the project and later will find some ways to improve the service.
   3. We are really capable to do this project as we have adequate man power and technical sound knowledge. One of the big organizations named Square group are financing us to do this project.
   4. We use some technology like lo-fi paper prototype and hi-fi interactive prototype for designing the website.
   5. The outcome will be great but there will be some limitation like it will be little bit slower, less people can access the website at a time but hopefully we can overcome those obstacles later by taking proper steps and make this website user friendly and help them to make their decision.

3. Produce a specification for an agreed project to implement a new product, service or process

Supervisor Name: Mohammad Tashfeen Khan

Student Name: Student # Course

1. Other 9900701 E160UM
   
   

   Project Title: On-line shopping IExploreReviews system

   
   

   Field of Computing & Intelligent Systems in which project resides: Client-Server, Distributed Objects, communications

   
   

   Project Aims: To provide the customer reviews and product information and make the purchasing decision easy and stunt.

   Project Description:

   • The website which will provide user experience and finally they will help to a customer to make a decision.
   • The User interface will be simple, concise and clear, with latest up-to-date info using the user language.
   • All the information will present in such way user can make choices, all the data will be analyzed and filtered.
   • All the data will be transparent and it will show the reference websites
   • Offer a motivation for the client to save his time and feel confident to make a purchasing decision.

Hardware and Software Required: 2 PC's (one server, one client), Internet Connection. Sun JDK, OrbixWeb/VisiBroker ORB's, RationalRose, IE/Netscape, MS Access.

Project Deliverables: demonstration software: GUI - Java applet, MiddleWare - CORBA, Server - Database

Project Report

Risk Assessment: None

[2]

2Be able to plan for the implementation of a project to implement a new product, service or process

1. Produce a project plan for an agreed project

   
   

   Phase	Task	Description of tasks
   Phase-1: Discovery	Idea generation and brain storming	Here team members write down various concept according to project and stick those notes. They use affinity diagrams
   	Comparative analysis	In here we are comparing our website with some other customer reviewing website and find out the difference.
   	Needs assessment process	Here we will develop the service to help customer to do online shopping more easily and comfortably. Normally product reviews and recommendation attract most for that we are working on that to influence purchasing behaviour.
   	Informal interviews	Here we do the informal interviews with people who do offline and online shopping, and how they use internet product reviews and how it is influencing people in decision making. We ask same questions to different people and try to find out what they want while they do shopping
   	Finding	Here we find customer behaviour of shopping, what they like in online shopping and what they dislike. We will find out what people think about product reviews and hopefully they don’t want to visit various website for product reviews, they will prefer one and single website
   	Contextual Inquiry	Here we will do the contextual inquiry, which is called UCD, where we design the website according the potential users requirements. We do the research on target users and find out what they usually want in online shopping in order to make their purchasing decision.
   Phase-2:Design	Lo-fi paper	In here we do the paper prototype design to get

   	prototype	the feedback from the stakeholders without investing a lot of money in interactive prototype. It is the pre-stage of interactive prototype. Here we do the two different data visualizations and see how users react on those
   	Hi-fi interactive prototype	Here we present our design ideas, correcting after the lo-fi interactive prototype environment. Here we simulate all of our features by using mocked static data. Here users give their opinion regarding the website as it is easy, moderate of difficult.
   Phase- 3:Implementation	Usability of final prototype	Here we implement our design and expose it for the users. It is free to use but there are some limitation like delay in time and number of users. We will get the feedback on functionality, usability, navigation and layout, new data visualization and the parallel tag cloud on the explore page.
   	System implementation	Here we implement the system like we have home, explore, product details, helpful reviews webpage.
   	Data extraction and processing	Here data extraction and processing is being completed. There are a lot of technical synchronization between API, PHP, XML for data extraction and exhibition and MySQL is being used for data storage.

   
   

2. Match appropriate resources to the project

   
   
   
   
   In this project we need various kinds of resources and I am mentioning those in the following
   part:
   • Active project members to complete the project
   • Some user or participant to take part in our research activities
   • Lo-fi prototype we need cardboard, paper, post-its, marker, stickers
   • 2 PC's (one server, one client), Internet Connection.Sun JDK, OrbixWeb/VisiBroker ORB's, RationalRose, IE/Netscape, MS Access.
   • Demonstration software: GUI - Java applet, MiddleWare - CORBA,
   • Server - Database
     [3]

3. Cost all resources required for implementing a project

   
   
   
   

   Product	Cost
   Active members* 5	£1000/ member
   User or participant* 100	£10/ user
   Lo-fi prototype’s instruments	£150
   2 pc	£ 1000
   Internet connection	£ 50
   Webpage	£ 200
   Other software	£ 300
   Other expenses	£ 2000
   Total	£9700

   
   
   
   
   The total cost will be around 10000 pound
   
   

4. Agree timescales for the management and implementation of a project

   
   

   Phase	Task	Description of tasks
   Phase-1: Discovery	Idea generation and brain storming	5 days
   	Comparative analysis	5 days
   	Needs assessment process	4 days
   	Informal interviews	10 days
   	Finding	3 days
   	Contextual Inquiry	2 days

   Phase-2:Design	Lo-fi paper prototype	10 days
   	Hi-fi interactive prototype	20 days
   Phase- 3:Implementation	Usability of final prototype	10 days
   	System implementation	10 days
   	Data extraction and processing	5 days
   Future website direction		5 days

   Total= 90 days or 3 months
   
   

5. Plan an appropriate strategy for the implementation of a project

   
   
   There are some difference between casual online shopping and our ProductExporeReview system. The causal review system is describing below like the customer is looking for a camera, so the system is
   1. First of all select the department: Electronics
   2. Select the product type: Camera, Photo and Video
   3. Select: Digital camera
   4. Consider the options- there are hundreds of cameras- click on a camera that looks very nice
   5. Then there is a webpage with product images, purchasing information, rating, and a link to the brand website, the choice between used, refurbished and new products. Then it is possible to see what customer buy ultimately after viewing those items, or customer can explore similar items or see special product promotion or offer and items frequently bought together.
   6. There are some information regarding product details, technical details, more photos, product descriptions, accessories and product ads from external websites.
   7. Customer can rate those products to improve their requirements, scroll down and see customer reviews, see the most useful customer reviews, see rating details, rate the product reviews as useful or not and provide your own review. After that there is a discussion portion of customers.
   There are some problems in this system like customers have to visit some other website for more information. Those website are product centric than customers intended use. Even most of the time there are information available only for one product, sometimes there are a lot of information regarding product and customer lost their patience to scroll down the whole page to see the customer reviews.
   IExploreReviews has a different strategy, instead of starting with the product and scrolling down to customer written reviews it allows the customers to start the product search process by watching the product features written by the other customers. The customer can choose the features, experience of interest and uses and then be presented with only products with those selected features as a filter used to narrow choices. [4]
   
   

1. Be able to implement a project

   
   

   1. Implement a project in accordance with an agreed specification

      
      
      This is the main portion of the project where we implement it and get the outcomes. We divided the website in three major sub-portions which were developed using Web standards. In this system the main user interface development is the Explore product features subset, which can change parallel tag cloud visualization to help facilitate the browsing of different tags related to reviews. The second one is Product list page, where customer chooses the products on basis on the previously selected tags. The last one is the product details and helpful reviews webpage which is strategically designed with the aim of presenting users with reviews that would be pertinent to them.

      Home webpage:

      
      
      
      Explore webpage:
      
      
      
      
      
      Product list webpage:
      
      
      
      Product details webpage:
      
      
      
      
      
      Helpful reviews webpage:
      
      
      
      The final design will focus on all the user research and feedback from the usability tests at the each design iteration. It focus on the functionality of allowing the online customer to view the topics other customers have identified as useful and mark those, which are of interested. Customers can see which products are available and have access to the original clients written reviews from various website with price comparisons and a retail website to purchase the product.

   2. Develop appropriate measures to monitor and evaluate progress and Outcomes

      
      
      For measuring the progress and outcomes we can do the usability test prototype where we get the feedback from the customer regarding the usability, functionality, navigation and layouts. We introduce parallel tag cloud which attracts the customer interest. Here customer gives their opinion regarding the whole system. They will give some suggestion how to improve the quality of service or how to make proper purchasing decision. In here when customer clicked on the explore page and some tag clouds will be visible in the explore page. Customer gets excitement and able to see various customers comments which will give him a sense.
      
      
      The result of this test is the data visualization where customer can learned how to work with them and they had the power to cause frustration and confusion. This is the early stages of the project development but in near future there will be some other things to make the system more effective.
      
      

   3. Monitor the implementation of the project

      
      
      We have a monitoring team which is always active to monitor the progress of the project. It is a 3 months duration project so proper time management is needed. The total budget of this project is 10000 pound so proper money management is needed as well. Monitoring team are always looking for the progress. Though we are giving more emphasis on customer reviews we must give important to customer feedback. We need to change our strategy if customers give any complain against our service the monitoring team will inform the implementation team and then design team will do some amend in design and then the outcome will be great.
      
      

2. Be able to evaluate the outcomes of a project

   
   

   1. Analyse the outcomes of a project in terms of the original project specification

      
      
      The outcome is great which is very much helpful to determine the purchasing decision. However there are some constraints like time limitation which makes the project less fruitful than what was mentioned in project specification. The outcomes cover all the major features but there will
      be some developments in future like automating the backend system, creating user profiles, a mobile application, saving product history and a social network component.
      
      
      Adding content in backend system is a manual process now where the content are brought from the external sources as a raw data and then analyzed on the server before being accessed by the final prototype. We need to make this process automatic and it is one of our failure and we will work on it in next time to make it automatic which will add new content form the multiple sources for current and new product domains. The system will be more helpful if we provide incorporate user profile where we can store user preferences and allow users to reserve their research history. It helps users to start and stop their research into a product domain at their leisure. There will be some facility to share their research history with others.
      
      

   2. Evaluate the outcomes of a project

      
      
      The outcome of this project is good. Our main objectives of this project was make the online shopping easy and give some assistance to the online shoppers to make their purchasing power quickly. We do the same things like other product reviews websites but we approach in different ways and this is the most effective ways to pursue the users and it is hassle free and user feel comfortable to get their desire product. More precisely the result of our project was achieved by 80%. We can achieve 100% if we get some extra time and sponsor.
      
      

   3. Make justified recommendations for improvements to the project

      
      
      For the improvement of this project we need to look in three sectors which is mentioning below
      • There will be a user profile account where user can store their research activities and they can do their research activities at their free times. This profile can share with other users.
      • Sometimes people want to do their shopping from the store and they can do their research at the same time if there is a mobile application which will allow a user to sing into their account and utilize or continue their product research on the go.
      • The research found that most of the people are influenced by their friend while doing the shopping so a social network aspect of the website seems like a great idea to expand upon in the future.

3. Be able to present the outcomes of a project

   
   

   1. Produce a report of all project procedures used

      
      

      Phase	Task
      Phase-1: Discovery	Idea generation and brain storming
      	Comparative analysis
      	Needs assessment process
      	Informal interviews
      	Finding
      	Contextual Inquiry
      Phase-2:Design	Lo-fi paper prototype
      	Hi-fi interactive prototype
      Phase-3:Implementation	Usability of final prototype
      	System implementation
      	Data extraction and processing
      Future website direction

      
      

   2. Present the outcomes of the project to an audience using an agreed format and appropriate

Our achievement is 80% as we mentioned in the project specification but we can achieve 100% if we have adequate time and money.

Conclusion:

The main objective of this project is to help the customers in online product research problem.

Day by day online shopping getting popularity and people are too much interested to do shopping online because it is hassle free, don’t need to carry the stuffs and so on. We want to make the online shopping easy and hassle free by providing proper product information and customer reviews.

Customer and product reviews play a vital role in online shopping. Finally we want to say we did not reach our destination by 100% but the outcome is fruitful and user’s response was very significant.

There are some other website who provide the customer reviews and product information but in different ways and sometime they charge for this service but we are providing those without money and a very effective ways. In near future there will be some improvement in this sector. Hopefully in near future people can choose their best product by using customer reviews and product information.[5]

References:

1. Levin, Aron M., Irwin P. Levin, and Joshua A. Weller. "A MULTI-ATTRIBUTE ANALYSIS OF PREFERENCES FOR ONLINE AND OFFLINE SHOPPING: DIFFERENCES ACROSS PRODUCTS, CONSUMERS, AND SHOPPING STAGES." Journal of Electronic Commerce Research 6.4 (2005): 281-90. Web. Access on: 22/08/11
   
   
2. LIWC - Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count. Access on: 22/08/11, Available on: http://www.liwc.net/
   
   
3. Rainie, Lee. "Internet, Broadband, and Cell Phone Statistics." Access on: 22/08/11, Available on:http://pewresearch.org/pubs/1454/demographic-profiles-internet-broadband cellphone- wireless-users

4."Online Activities, 2000-2009 | Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life

Project." Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project. Access on: 22/08/11, Available on: http://www.pewinternet.org/Trend-Data/Online-Activities-20002009.aspx/

5.Spool, Jared M. "The Magic Behind Amazon's 2.7 Billion Dollar Question." Access on: 22/08/11, Available on: http://www.uie.com/articles/m