Student Records System SRS - Preliminary Planning Overview

The School of Prosperity (SoP) is a small Information Technology & Science school located in the nation’s capital of Washington, D.C. The school serves a growing student population of about 5000 students by offering programs leading to the Bachelor and Master degrees in IT and Software development.

SoP has, traditionally, offered most of its classes in a face-to-face modality. Recently and because of the increased demands of student enrollments, the school started to offer some of its classes online as well.

The school staff currently uses an in-house desktop application to keep track of students, courses, and to register students for classes. School staff has to be physically in the office in order to access the in-house application. To register for a class (either face-to-face or online class), a student must complete a paper registration form, submit it to the school staff, and the staff will then enter the registration information into the desktop application.

This process always generates many errors in moving from the paper form to the electronic registration filing. Moreover, since there are so many add/drops at the beginning of each semester, the school staff experiences a higher than normal work volume handling these add/drop forms preventing them for completing other tasks allocated to them like staff development and training.

To keep up with the high demands of increased enrollments, the sponsor is promoting the idea of the school investing in a new Internet-accessible Student Record System dubbed SRS. This system would allow students to handle their own class registrations from any location that has an Internet connection. The SRS would also allow staff to maintain student body records, courses, and scheduled online and face-to-face classes offered for those course as well.

We expect the new system to improve the morale of the staff because they will be able to work on new and interesting projects instead of registration. The staff will then be able to better serve the students in other ways. Also, the students will appreciate the new registration system because it registers them quickly without errors. Both of these factors will create a more positive attitude toward the school with the public which should help to increase enrollment.

Week 1 Page 1 It has been estimated that the new system will reduce the amount of hours spent by staff registering students by 90%. Presently it takes 1000 staff hours to register the 5000 students enrolled in the school each session. There are six sessions each year. The average hourly pay for registering staff is $20. The school expects enrollment to increase 5% each year whether the new system is implemented or not. Without the new system, the staff hours needed to register students would increase by 5% as well. It is also expected that the new system will increase staff productivity by 10% when maintaining the student, course, and class database records online for a savings of $50,000 each year. All paper to electronic filing error costs would be eliminated. It will also reduce paper and printer costs by $3,000 a year.

Security is an issue that must be addressed since students will have access to school files. Because of the rapid increase in enrollment, this project needs to be finished in one year’s time. Perhaps time and cost can be saved by integrating some of the existing registration system.