Question

GardenTraker

Suppose that you and some other students have done lawn care, or been groundskeepers, and you have decided to go out on your own and open a business that offers landscaping services. Your goal is to develop a list of clients for whom you provide regular and recurring services, such as mowing and weeding, plus specialty services, such as pruning, garden preparation, sprinkler installation and repair, and the like.

You need an information system for tracking customers, services you have provided, and services you are scheduled to provide in the future. As a new small business, you want a simple and affordable system based on Excel or Access. The name of the system will be GardenTraker.

1. Explain how you would use the SDLC to develop GardenTraker.

2. Define the scope of your system.

3. Explain the process you would use to determine the feasibility of GardenTraker. List data you need for such an assessment, and explain how you might obtain or estimate that data.

4. Consider the tracking of recurring services, and list all of the requirements that you can imagine for that functionality. Be specific and answer at least the following:
   1. What data will you need?
   2. How will you input that data?
   3. Specify any other requirements you believe are important for tracking recurring services.

5. Considering just the recurring services functionality, do you think it would be better to use Excel or Access for this project? Is there some other tool? List the criteria you used to answer that question. Summarize the consequences of making a poor choice between products.

6. What does this short exercise tell you about information systems development? Think about it, and answer this question in such a way that you could use your answer to demonstrate your critical-thinking skills in a job interview

Answer 1

As a first step, we need to identify an area where people prefer having a garden. Once we finalize the locality from where we can start our initial business operation, we should approach each household explaining the range of services that we can provide and why they should go with us rather than doing that themselves.

As explained initially our range of services should include lawn keeper, groundskeeper, landscaping services, mowing and weeding, gardening, pruning, garden preparation, sprinkler installation and repair, and the like. We would use the best of the equipment and will have a team to execute the work. Thus the household can save their money of buying the same equipment and can also spend their time on other personal interest.

Create a list of the household who will need the service
Approach these households and explain our methods and range of service
Work for those households who have agrred to avail our service
Note down the details and keep a tab when the work is done
Understand the growth patterns, time frame required when the lawn need to be mowed again and weeding need to be done. Feed these details in the system so that they can remind in advance
Approach these same households before the next weeding and repeat the process
On satisfactory work, try to gain new customers and use customer references. Word of mouth marketing works extremely well for small businesses.
Once a steady business has been established, try to provide augmented services like installation of sprinklers, selling special flowers and planting them.
Add on services like dog houses or tree houses can be built for the household.
The data can be collected in an excel file where details are as follows: