I have been asked to create an ICT solution for a local events and promotions company called; EVDOP Live

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Matthew Dickinson         INFO 1- Sample Work        2012-2013

Centre Number: 34349        Candidate Number: 7049

 Analysis - Problem identification with a list of requirements. Plus Interpretation of them as input, Processes and Output

Company Background

I have been asked to create an ICT solution for a local events and promotions company called; EVDOP Live. EVDOP Live is a company located in south Liverpool who provides an exclusive service in which they promote various local bands/musicians and organise gigs and events within various local venues. Prominent examples of the venues that EVDOP Live use are; The 02 Academy, the Liverpool guild hall of students and lastly the Liverpool philharmonic hall. Aside from orgainsing the venues and bands, EVDOP live also provide events management services. By this I mean they orgainse security services and also merchandise to any customer who desires these services. The purpose of the company is to create some form of profit which they do in various ways. One of which being charging a small percentage of the ticket price in relation to the sales of the tickets and also charging for various other services for bands such as advertising and printing of venue ticket costs. EVDOP would contract a printing company to print the venue tickets, and then sell them to the prospective performers at a slight increase of price; is in order to make a profit. EVDOP also advertise in various forms of media. They utilise the local radio station; Radio City to convey the dates prices and locations of the various events that they organise. Aside from radio, they also advertise in various local papers such as; The Liverpool Echo- (Liverpool’s local newspaper) and also a country wide newspaper- The Daily Mirror.  And again with reference to security services which is a key aspect of EVDOP’s business, they usually pay forefront for a security firm known as ATMOS Security ltd. This decision was based on the profitability of the company, as they offer the cheapest possible quote to the business. In comparison to various other security firms, ATMOS provide a relatively cheap cost of £60 per member of security used, compared with another company- BONNAFIDE Security- they charge £130 per member of staff. The company could not be run currently without a solid staff base there are 5 key members of staff at EVDOP live, they are;

Peter Evans – Kerry Lindop -- Managing Directors of EVDOP Live

Andrew Dufrain- Head of finance

Ellis Redding- Head of administration

James Whitmore- Head of marketing & Publicity

Both Peter Evans and Kerry Lindop as managing directors tend not to take a predominately active role within the company. Although the decisions that they make will affect everyone else. Their main priority within the company is to ensure that everything runs smoothly in terms of business, and no damage occurs to their best interests. Hence the reason that they both contacted me, to ensure that their business remains functional and performing at its optimum. They take control over the allocation of the allocations of business funding and the provisional aspects of the business. Andrew Dufrain as head of finance ensures that the business expenditure is controlled and tries to ensure that some level of profit comes into the company. This si done through manual calculations within his office. Ellis Redding as head of administration is in charge with all of the paperwork which comes through EVDOP Live. With the current system that EVDOP Live employs, Mr. Redding has o use a paper based system to complete the various forms of administration that he needs to do. Examples of what he has to do are to organise letters to be sent to customers and other tasks as such. Lastly James Whitmore plays a key role in the company. He is in charge of publicising key events within the company. Without him not many people would be aware of the events which EVDOP Live have to offer.

Problems with the current system and how they need to be solved

At the present moment EVDOP Live are a growing business and are expanding constantly and as a result they need a new system in order to move on and improve from the previous stages of the company. Currently in terms of advertising and publicity, it can be seen that EVDOP is losing a substantial amount of money through their preferred form of advertising, which is leafleting and handing out promotional cards. Although this allows the canvassers and leafleters to engage and ensure they hand out a large amount of leaflets, there is no guarantee that the leaflets would be kept and referred to. This has been shown through the average person’s actions when receiving a leaflet, they usually throw it away; this is because now people don’t have time to read the literature they are given. Improvements could be made here by digitising the forms of advertising by transferring the contents of leaflets onto for example a twitter account or a facebook page/ online blog etc. This would make it more relevant and accessible to the prospective customers, who can access it form a mobile device and other forms of media. This would therefore improve efficiency of the company, as they would not need to product mass amounts of leaflets which would in theory just go to waste. Also with an E- information area, corrections can be made, if for example an event is changed. This cannot be performed on tickets as they are hard copies, but with a digital copy alteration and adjustments can be made therefore massively saving costs for the company which is essentially. Additionally there are some obvious financial problems within the company. After viewing the current system which deals in the various forms of costs and also expenditure. The current system does not take into account the current venue costs and takes an average cost of previous costs to now to work out costs. This is not accurate and creates various errors within the system itself, occasionally inducing losses into the company. Additionally the financial aspects of the business are completed on paper and by manual calculation, which in turn creates errors for the company in the calculation of costs etc. This is due to the fact that manual calculation can lead to erroneous mistakes, as people can have an “Off Day”. A solution for this would be to computerise the current financial system onto a spreadsheet for example. This would allow the costs of the company to be calculated in an accurate and precise way. The computer based system would perform automatic calculations which would improve company efficiency as it would reduce the time needed to calculate costs previous to this system. Aside from finance as well, there are problems located within the administration of the company. Currently EVDOP is a paper based system, by which I mean it is not computerised at the moment. This can lead to many mistakes being made, in particular the misplacement of the documents needed for a task. An essential way to combat this would be to computerise the administration system. This would allow more organisation within the company as there will be less margin for mistakes to be made, and will allow all records to be maintained and kept up to date. This will allow in the future for EVDOP to contact them with other information, which may not be possible under a hard based system due to misplacement of data. This would be created in a database type format as it will improve functionality and accessibility and prevent errors and allow for alterations to be made.  

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Identifying Clients, Users and Audience for a company

Traditionally a client in terms of ICT systems is somebody or someone who requests a solution to an outstanding ICT system problem. An example of this would be someone who requests a solution for a dysfunctional spreadsheet, so contacts somebody to fix the problem. With reference to the task that I’ve been given the clients that I will be creating a solution for will be the managing directors of EVDOP Live- these would be; Miss. Kerry Lindop and a Mr. Peter Evans. In the above ...

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Overall this is a four star piece of work, although I think five for effort! It starts off very well and gives good levels of details for organisation, what they do, the key people and so on. There is a lot of text which is interesting and not too repetitive. This does tail off towards the end though and the final sections are not as succinct and the student tends to wander from the central needs - for example the issue of financial modelling seems to take a back seat and this was a major need of the company. As a whole, the piece of work needs greater structure. More headings and sub-headings in order to make it clear to the reader what is being tackled in each section but also to make it easier for the student when they come to use this in the exam (which in INFO1 they do). This does detract somewhat from the quality of what is said. I feel that as the work progresses the central needs identified so well in the initial sections are sidelined. The student needs to go back and list the key needs and from them get a definitive list of user requirements which can then be turned into success criteria which will inform the design of the solution and also form the basis of testing and evaluation.