User:Jepan

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Background
iSAMS Ltd. was established in 7 years ago by Alastair Ian Price and Greak Pakes. At first it has been just a small project that involved two undergraduate students, but is soon evolved into the business idea. It has taken almost 4 years of the development before the product could be brought to the market. The main product of the iSAMS Ltd is a web-based education administrative system for independent schools called iSAMS The most exciting aspect of the product is that it can be access from any part of the world. There is no other Management Information System that has the same advantage. iSAMS is fully customizable. Each part of the system can be adjusted to the individual needs of school. iSAMS is the module based system, which means that schools can choose what they require, as each part of the system runs independently. Another advantage of this MIS system is its security. The whole system and individual modules are protected buy advanced security techniques. Moreover it provides the facility to the system administrator to customize the aces rights to every part of the system. ISAMS is an open source product. Schools have access to the source code and database which allows them to create their own modules which can be plug into the iSAMS.

The basic iSAMS package contains following modules:
-	Pupil Manager -	Staff Manager -	School Manager -	Teaching Manager -	Timetable Manager -	Census Reports -	Discipline Manager -	Other Schools -	File Manager -	Email Manager -	School Directory -	SMS Manager -	Calculator -	iSAMS Messenger -	SQL Reporting Services

The additional features that can be plug into system at any time are as follow:
-	Reports Manager -	Assignment System -	Examination Manager -	Registration Manager -	Internal Exam Manager -	Pupil Profile System -	Rewards and Conducts -	SEN manager -	Mark Book -	Sports Manager -	Extra -Curricular Manager -	Music Manager

Modules in development:

-	Tracking Manager -	Fees and Billings -	Activities Manager -	Virtual Learning Environment -	School Shop -	IPTV and VOD

Although the iSAMS is the main product the company offers a few additions such as Parent Portal and Student Portal. Parent Portal allows the parents to be more involve with their children education. This systems allows the parents to have access to their children data stored within the iSAMS. Users of the portal can view their offspring grades, attendance, assessment results, reports, timetable and other options. The schools can decide on what should be visible to parents. Student Portal allows pupils to access authorised by school data such as their timetable, assignments and grades. Moreover it gives students the space to store their school related files. Each user can personalise their website to show the things that are most useful to them.

2)	Competition Below is the list of main iSAMS competitors. All of the MIS have been on the market many years before iSAMS. -	SIMS Has the biggest share in the MIS market for Independent Schools, around 60%. The system is very stable as it focuses on most common aspects of school administration. It is one of the cheapest systems as it costs around £2.50 per pupil per year. The software package contains the Performance Analysis module. iSAMS is still in the process of developing one. -	Phoenix The company has been on the market for nearly 40 years. The management and sells department has much more experience than the iSAMS one. The company originates from United States of America which gives them advantage of the market scale. -	WCBS The company has nearly 25 year experience of developing the software for schools. WCBS have been chosen by over 400 Independent Schools, which gives them nearly 20% share of the market.

There are around 2500 Independent Schools in United Kingdom. iSAMS has been chosen by 50 of them, which is around 2% of the market.

Market share

3)	Current Scenario

iSAMS team receives around 20 tickets every day. Each one of 12 developers is emailed 10 - 20 times a day with queries or requests from the clients. The office is called around 30 – 40 times.

iSAMS has a in-house ticket system which is not very sophisticated. Each of the clients can submit a ‘Bug/System Fault’, ‘Help Request’ or ‘Feature Request’ ticket on the client website. When ticket is submitted the system emails each developer with the details of the request. At this state ticket is not assign to anyone. The customer support person is responsible for ticket allocation or the ticket may be picked up by the developer directly and he/she can assign in to himself/herself. The iSAMS find a difficulty in managing the tickets and a lot of them are left unassigned for a long time. Tracking the progress of each ticket is also difficult as each one can only have four statuses: ‘Not allocated’, ‘Allocated’, ‘Marked as Finished’ and ‘Closed’. Each ticket can have three priority types: ‘Urgent’, ‘Normal’ and ‘Low’, they are chosen by the client while submitting the request. The priority type cannot be adjusted after ticket submission. The ticket can be only closed by the client and a significant amount of them is ‘Marked as Finished’ by the developer but never ‘Closed’ by client. The other team members do not have a direct access to other member’s tickets. There is a report listing all the ticket grouped by client type, school name and person that submitted the ticket, but is hard to use and finding a desirable ticket is very hard unless the team member knows a ticket number. There is no search facility on the ticket system.

Once the school person learns which member of iSAMS team is responsible for which module they start to email them directly with requests and queries rather then submit tickets. The customers think that it will speed up the process of dealing with the request. The developers ask many times the customers to use the ticket system instead of an email, but unsuccessfully. Only the owner of the email address can access it and company do not have a system that will convert an email in to ticket or assign it to another team member. Many emails get omitted and usually the emails are processed much slower than tickets.

There is a significant duplication of the tickets and emails. iSAMS does not have a knowledge base, which causes the developers and support team to answer the same questions many times. iSAMS has a Community Forum that suppose to deal with this problem and allow the customers to help each other out and answer each other questions. Unfortunately the forum is not popular among the iSAMS users.

When the phone ranges tries their best to help the customers, but the queries and request are never written down, which causes a lost of data and customer dissatisfaction as the not noted conversation can be easily forgotten.

iSAMS does not have a facility to keep all the customer requests in one place.

The management team and team leaders need to keep a tab on the support team and developers. They need to be able to report on their performance to boost team and customer satisfaction. As for now this is impossible as iSAMS does not use any progress tracking solution.

The customer support is inefficient which causes the delays in processing and dealing customers requests. Many customers are aware of this situation and try to prioritise their inquiry by using the email, ticket system and phoning the office at the same time for just single query, which causes a vast amount of duplication and managing harder. The iSAMS company needs a help desk solution to be implemented as soon as possible before they start drowning in the ocean of tickets, emails and phone calls.