Some organisations use very ad hoc approaches to selecting and acquiring software that may result in them not being aware of appropriate products, o

Background

Some organisations use very ad hoc approaches to selecting and acquiring software that may result in them not being aware of appropriate products, or in choosing non-optimal software. Using a systematic approach to software evaluation is important to ensure that software that meets organisational requirements.

To do

Read the Topic 8 material on software evaluation and acquisition. This will introduce you to the notions of evaluation criteria and the weighted score approach.

Investigate criteria that might be important in making a decision about which modelling software package to recommend. You should consider what you will need to do to complete the modelling in the Business Process Management assignment and also what has been written by others about selecting this kind of software.

Choose the set of criteria to be used in the evaluation (note: there must be at least 6). You will need to justify the choice of each criterion in your report.

Determine the relative importance of each of these criteria for choosing a tool to undertake the Business Process Management assignment. The outcome of this will be a relative weighting for each criterion.

Identify 3 possible modelling packages that support BPMN 2.0 these will be your alternatives. Microsoft Visio should be one of them. You must be able to get access to all of them for the purposes of the evaluation this could be by downloading a full copy (e.g. obtain Visio from Azure Dev Tools), obtaining a trial copy or getting permission to test it on someone elses machine.

Use the weighted score method to evaluate your alternatives using the criteria and weightings you have specified. An Excel spreadsheet should be used to support the evaluation and identify which product has the highest ranking. This should use the variation of the weighted score method that includes raw scores and final scores for each criterion (see Topic 8 slides).

Determine which modelling software package you recommend.

Create a report based on your evaluation. This must follow the specified structure (see below).

Format Guidelines

Your report should be clearly written in language suitable for IT professionals to understand.

Your report should be around 1500 words in length.

Your report should have the following structure to ensure that it presents the information in a logical and useful way:

Title page, with a title that clearly reflects its contents.

Table of contents. This must be generated using the Word Table of Contents feature.

Introduction. This section should introduce the purpose of the report.

Criteria. This section should:

describe how you identified relevant criteria

provide a brief discussion of potential criteria

include your final set of criteria (note: there must be at least 6) and why each of them was chosen to include as important in the decision

Relative importance of criteria. This section should discuss and justify the relative importance of each criteria for choosing a tool to undertake the Business Process Management assignment . It should include the percentage weighting of each criterion.

Modelling packages. This section should provide a brief description of each of the 3 candidate modelling packages modelling packages that support BPMN 2.0. Microsoft Visio should be one of them.

Evaluation. This section should briefly describe how you evaluated each software package on of the criteria in order to provide the data for the the weighted score method.

Recommendation. This section should include a table that documents the outcomes of the evaluation and be supported by a recommendation of which modelling software package is recommended based on the evaluation.

Bibliography. This should list all the resources you consulted in undertaking the evaluation and writing the report. These should be presented using APA referencing style. Your report should also include citations when you directly quote facts you have obtained from sources but it is not intended to be an academic essay and should primarily be your work and words.

The guidelines are as follows:

Introduction

Criteria

Relative importance of criteria

Modelling packages

Evaluation

Recommendation

Report structure and presentation

For the criteria section:

Should be focused on functionality but only use 1 or 2 non-functional requirements if you can properly motivate a case for including it. Motivating your criteria is part of the Criteria section. Clearly explain why is this criterion important for you performing your second assignment.

Not be generic to software in general. Example usability or user interface is important to all software. This paper should be specific to BPMN diagram software. We have looked at BPMN diagram software criteria in topic 6 and topic 8. Use these as a starting point.

Should be measurable. You have to attach a score to the criteria and you have to explain how you have reached that score in the Evaluation section. Need to know how you went about scoring it. Eg:you can count the number of supported file formats of the software.

Advantages of Acquiring Software? These are some benefits that it has been suggested exist when organisations meet their system requirements with packaged software (or customised packaged software):

Cost savings Time savings Quality benefits Available documentation and training Organised maintenance and enhancement Try before you buy Why/how are these benefits achieved?

Disadvantages? The following are some possible disadvantages of meeting system requirements with packaged software (or customised packaged software):

Lack of ownership Financial instability of supplier Lack of competitive edge Failure to fully fit requirements Inability to cope with changing requirements What are the implications of each of these issues?

An application can range from being an unmodified, commercial off theshelf (COTS) software package to being a completely custom program Advantages and disadvantages vary between these extremes

Initial Selection Some organisations use very ad hoc approaches that may result in them not being aware of appropriate products Should use a selection team to avoid single person bias -include technical experts, domain experts and end users What approaches / sources of information can be used to identify products?

Request for Proposal If the organisationisnt already committed to a single product, get proposals from vendors. A request for proposal (RFP) communicates requirements and desired features to vendors, who then respond with proposals. What should an RFP include?

EVALUATION:

Many criteria can be used to evaluate software and they can be grouped in different ways Types of high level criteria can include: oAbility to meet functional requirements oAbility to meet non-functional requirements oAbility to meet supplier requirements oAbility to meet implementation requirements oAbility to meet cost and time constraints If a criterion is an imperativethen if the product does not meet that criterion it must be excluded from the selection process. What are some examples of imperatives?

Ability to meet Functional Requirements What are functional requirements? How are functional requirements determined and documented?

Ability to meet Supplier Requirements Supplier requirements usually relate to issues such as: Level of experience Supplier stability Financial robustness

Ability to meet Implementation Requirements Criterion associated with implementation can include issues related to: Initial training Hardware installation Conversion of data Quality of documentation Upgrade policy

Ability to meet Cost and Time Constraints Criteria related to cost and time provide an opportunity to balance cost and time against other issues in the selection process But if cost or time is an imperative the product will just be ruled in or out and cost and/or time omitted from the evaluation matrix

Evaluation Approaches In order to systematically select a product or proposal each candidate solution must be evaluated on the selected criteria and ranked But not all criteria are likely to be of equal importance to the organisation. Why not? A large variety of techniques that take this into account have been proposed -see Land, Blankers, Chaudronand Crnkovic(2008) for some examples

Weighted Score Method The weighted score method is the most commonly used formal approach Variations exist but it generally works as follows: 1.Criteria are defined and each criterion is assigned a weight 2.Each alternative is rated on each criterion 3.Weighted scores are then tabulated in some way for each alternative 4.Alternative with highest score is chosen

Weighted Score Method Example

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Weighted Score Method Problems include: Difficulty of assigning weights when large number of criteria Difficulty of assigning scores As the results are numbers, they can easily be interpreted as if they represent true differences between the alternatives they dont Difficult to define criteria so that they are independent (i.e. dont overlap) or if this cant be done, difficult to adjust weights to compensate for overlap

Variation on Weighted Score Method -Example

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Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) AHP is a complex multiple criteria decisionmaking technique It is based around decomposing a multiple criteria decision making problem into a hierarchy Involves pair wise comparisons of alternatives Creating a hierarchy helps with understanding of the problem/decision For a worked example see: Kutluet al. (2014) http://www.ijastnet.com/journals/Vol_4_No_6_ November_2014/15.pdf

Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) Problems include: Can be time consuming because of the complex calculations and number of pair-wise comparisons Need to re-evaluate alternatives if the number of criteria or alternatives is changed Ranking depends on alternatives considered, adding or deleting alternatives can lead to changes in rank Commonly proposed in the academic literature but little practitioner use