Management in IT

Business Plan
Contents
Section 1: Case study and IT initiative ...................................................................................... 4

a) Summary of the IT project initiative École 42................................................................ 4

b) The University’s overall strategic plan and objectives (225 words)............................... 5

c) The aim and objectives of the initiative (225 words) ..................................................... 6

Section 2: IT initiative staffing 800 ........................................................................................... 7

a) Review of the current IT staffing skills (400 words).......................................................... 7

b) Staffing policy plan for the IT department (400 words) ................................................. 8

Section 3: Staffing approaches 600............................................................................................ 9

a) Different staffing approaches (300 words) ..................................................................... 9

b) Preferred approach (150 words).................................................................................... 10

c) Ethical impact of the choice (150 words) ..................................................................... 11

Section 4: IT installation plan 600 ........................................................................................... 12

a) IT Implementation and installation plan (300 words)................................................... 12

b) Scheduled plan (Gantt chart) (150 words) .................................................................... 13

c) IT initiative budget plan (150 words) ........................................................................... 14

Section 5: Evaluation of initiative 900..................................................................................... 15

a) Impact of the new technology on the organisation (225 words) ................................... 15

b) Risk Assessment, Disaster Recovery Plan, or Business Continuity Planning for the IT

15

initiative. (225 words, any one of them) .............................. Error! Bookmark not defined.

c) Environmental impact and recommendations (225 words) .......................................... 16

References ................................................................................................................................ 18
 Section 1: Case study and IT initiative

a) Summary of the IT project initiative École 42

The IT Project initiative is regarding running lots of advanced online courses in the

university for higher education and transferring the university from a university with precise

online courses to an e-university. The general motive is to educate the students without

books, without teachers and without a physical classroom. The mission is to gain success and

become leaders and motivators in the development of education, by building great

opportunities for the working professionals and also for the recent high school graduates or

for students across the globe. Apart from the learning and the courses, the university also

aims at making every event at the university to be online such as faculty interaction,

classroom interaction, management activities, transferring credits, summer schools and much

more.

The Plan is to generate skills and learnings like Ecole 42, a non -profit, open to all

learning school with free tuitions on computer programming allowing students to learn

through framing projects without any restriction of age, status, country and religion, which

includes deep learning with flexible learning hours, thus maintaining the work life balance for

all the professionals and students enrolling for a particular course, providing variety of

options for courses and programs to enrol into according to the needs of the student. Such

education will definitely save money, travelling and the time which is much demanded by the

working professionals and also by the students where they are already involved into other

activities like, their family, friend, co-curricular activities. This type of education system

makes a student more focused and the student can concentrate well on their subjects,

(Friedman 2019). Also the plan is to include a technology in designing the online education

model, the technological innovation occurs involving the Internet and computer software, the

university will need to think of new progressions for online education. The university has to
involve technology such that educators deliver a positive and innovative experience for every

online student and this can be done with the help of IT professionals who can mould the

technology such that faculties can deliver the content online. Keeping in mind that online

learning can take place anywhere, anytime - the increase of mobile devices and internet based

devices can create new online educational direction. This direction, using collaboration tools,

can allow professors, students, and remote experts to visually connect with each other. Thus

the approach of borderless network can create dynamic online learning opportunities.

The university also focuses on providing education to all the students of multiple age

group whether working or not, living anywhere across the globe, the university proposes to

design such a system where students are to be digitally educated and making learning greater

by providing the students a balanced and comfortable learning environment. Influenced by

the idea and technique of such learning which will definitely benefit the students, a funding

has been received by the university from some organisation to plan, create and develop a

complete online university with all the programs and courses which would research and

create more innovate ideas for better learning of students. According to Ogunsakin (2015),

online and distance learning is the frontier of a new wave of growth in Education. With clear

mind set, plan, and funding, the university can move forward towards designing a prototype

with all the requirements and desires to make it a complete online university providing

students and working professional great benefits.

b) The University’s overall strategic plan and objectives

According to Elaine (2016), the strategic planning generally refers to the actions needed

to achieve the goals and achieve all the requirements and critical elements that were brought

into action during the planning of the project. The university’s master plan is to strengthen

the operations and ensure that the students and the administrative management achieve a

common goal i.e. to provide the best online education with varied choices. The university’s
objective is to create an online framework providing students online education, apart from

education, the university also focuses at delivering best learning and training to its students

through online projects, online faculties and classroom and facilitate all the student via online

connectivity. Increasing the enrolments, being classified among the top online universities

and becoming pioneers in the field is also amongst the top strategic plans of the university.

The goal is also to make the university a better place to learn for professionals as well as

students and release all their creativity and work through online project based learning,

creating a digital opportunity for each and every student to do their best and emerge as a

stronger student without any restrictions. The university wants their education system to be

more like Ecole 42’s education where the aim is to provide best education to all without

discriminating on the basis of age, status and any other barrier. “Our desire is to be able to

detect and select best talents and it would be absurd to miss some of the best under the pretext

that they are 35 or 40 years old.” (Sophie Viger, General Manager of 42 foundation).

c) The aim and objectives of the initiative

The aim of the university is to provide online educations to the general students, working

professionals and the students those who are unable to commute and even to the urbanites,

providing varied options in the courses. The university also focuses on providing educational

transparency, and by creating the education online also means increasing the transparency by

delivering learning, results, evaluations all online. The objective of the university is to

provide online education, workshops or trainings about eLearning for the students enrolling

under different courses. The online education also focuses at providing global resources and

libraries. The main objective is of making the university more innovative and to ensure better

development of the students through the courses without any hassles which include time

wastage, great expenditures, commuting issues. The university’s another objective is to

properly administrate the concept of this education and become leaders and pioneers in
educational developments benefiting students around the world. Like Ecole 42, the

university’s objective is to deliver best learning at low expenditure without books, teachers

and classrooms, and restricting all negative factors such as age, class, gender, colour. The

university tends to welcome all the students to learn and grow.

Section 2: IT initiative staffing

a) Review of the current IT staffing skills

The university already deals with online courses and have successful portfolios regarding

the online courses that are already available in the university. Apart from the online courses

running at the university there are varied aspects that are too dealt online. After having this

information about the university it can be clearly concluded that the university already has a

good IT staffing to handle all the online backend and frontend activities but will definitely

require more people in the staff if new online are to be launched. According to a recent

interview event that was conducted at the university and many stakeholders such as students,

faculties and the IT staff were questioned about the general satisfaction of the current services

provided by the IT staff and the reviews about the IT staffing. At the student’s end, most of

the students were satisfied and happy with the services, they further added that the courses,

assignments, quizzes, projects, and lectures are available most of the times on the portal until

and unless any connectivity issue persists. On the questioning, the faculties also gave some

positive reviews were provided regarding the video capturing’s, organising the video

schedules and launching them online while the IT staff advised to add more technical people

to handle the online processes, they further advised if the more online courses are added to

the previous courses the university will require a complete new IT staff. According to

Barnhart (2016), the university might be having a good amount of staff to handle all the web

based user interfaces with the dashboards where all the student details with the complete
activity details, the project and courses the student is currently working on while the other

department handling the database and updating all the data entries. According to Swan

(2017), The IT staff must be having a department to update all the course matter, update

modules, and make changes to the courses. On questioning the previous IT Staff about what

additions must be done, the IT staff answered the requirements that there must be a

department better known as Student technical support where students can file their

complaints regarding errors in their live sessions, online sessions, resolve the student queries,

password related issues. Another department will be required for delivering online lectures

and also the live lectures to the students, guiding the faculties for every specific delivery of

lectures by proving them reminders through mails and spreadsheets.

The administration system of the online university said that the online educators should

establish the need of administrators to be informed and prepared with strategic plans and

should be ready to face all the challenges. The concept really is appropriate as the digital

administration and staff should be ready to face all the problems that may occur during the

flow of courses.

b) Staffing policy plan for the IT department

Apart from having a good IT staffing with appropriate departments, the university now

plans to grow and they must require more IT specialists to handle the new operations that will

be coming into practice. With the innovation in the online education system and providing

more opportunities to the students, the university will definitely require more IT staff to

handle workloads. The university plans to give students more opportunities to grow, release

their creativity through vast project based learning which will require a staff to handle all the

student project activities.

The university also tends to bring the concept of Ecole 42 of no books, no teachers and no

classrooms and project based learning which would definitely require more human resources.
These human resources will comprise of team members who would handle the dashboard

where student will share and present their ideas, will also contain the faculty block to whom

the ideas must be presented. New faculties should be appointed for this specific project task

who should have good knowledge regarding the course related projects and can guide and

help the students well with their projects. Hogaboam (2017, p.75), states that the dashboard

should provide a connectivity so that the students can communicate from different parts to

each other if they tend to work on same projects or if they are interested in some new

proposal given by some student. The IT staff must design the dashboard in such a manner

that the faculties can approve the projects over the dashboard if the concepts seems to be

relevant and help students with the projects fetching new ideas and guiding them regularly.

Adding to this, the university provides higher education and it not only limits to basic theory

concepts, there are a lot concept that require physical or experimental demonstrations too.

Thus the university can hire a managing staff and the expertise faculties to demonstrate the

topics experimentally which would provide a better knowledge about the subject. Though the

students cannot perform the experiments physically but the IT staffing can design an

application regarding the experimental approach for the students to perform the experiments

virtually, watching the faculty either performing it live or online sessions of faculties or

experts performing and demonstrating the experiments. According to Anstey et al.(2017),

with the advancement in the development of university and initiating more innovation for

better student learning, the university will require a good staff who can handle all the work

pressure and help students learn better.

Section 3: Staffing approaches

a) Different staffing approaches

It is by now known that the university requires enough staffing to meet their own

expectations of becoming pioneers in the field and initiating good learning for the students.
There are enough staffing approaches that can be followed. The optimized approach focuses

on knowing your intentions and project and project activities well apart from that the

university should know their human resources and also the constraints by the organisation.

The staffing can be done on the basis of courses, every separate staff for every new course or

on the basis of departments that will be handling all operations related to all the courses. On

the basis of courses, for each specific course the university will require a different IT staffing.

When we classify the IT staff on the basis of courses each type of IT member in the team, the

one creating the dashboard for accessing the course subjects, other member handling the

database management, a separate member handling all the experiment department with a

team to record and film the online and live sessions, a department for handling student

queries and more. Now discuss about the IT staffing on the basis of departments, the

university can have a single department for handling the dashboard services for every

courses, other department for handling the maintenance part, while the other department

handling student queries and so on.

The different IT staffing approach may also include hiring high professionals having

years of experience on part time basis to deliver special lectures to the students on topics that

are really important and cannot be taught by full time faculty due to knowledge or time

issues. The university can also aim at hiring training organizations and consultancies for

online training sessions for the students. According to Tynan et al. (2015,p.5-15), online

universities are really labour intensive university requires lot of human resources at the

backend while maintaining the user interface. With the increasing courses and initiative to

advance the university more staffing will be definitely required.

b) Preferred approach

The university after looking and discussing about all the requirements and

developments to be made, bringing in consideration the previous working staff and the online
courses previously running in the university, the university should prefer staffing the online

IT staff on the basis of departments. The whole staff will be handling all the courses,

although the staff will be divided into different departments, each and every department will

work on all the courses ensuring proper working and maintenance of the user interface or the

dashboard, handling all the video lectures and live sessions by the faculties, the departments

will look together into any issues that persists. The university should follow this staffing

strategy so that all the departments can work coordinating every department, this strategy will

ensure proper communication and better management of the online system and the problems

persisting side wise. According to Piccianio (2016), Proper communication in the

departments will ensure proper resource and time management.

c) Ethical impact of the choice

The choice that is made by the university is about staffing the IT staff on the basis of

departments handling all the courses. This will definitely allow the university to grow

because as all the professionals and students want the learnings to be easy and fun. As per

Kauffman and Heather (2015), the students tend to perceive online education more than

education through traditional methods. The priority of the university is enhancing the online

education system they are running and the students demand such education system which will

definitely have a positive impact on the university fetching them new enrolments. The

students will have a better and a deeper learning, the students would work upon different

projects and showcase their creativity. All of this can only be done by the IT staff so as to

handle everything and maintain the smooth running of the system. Such strategy of working

by together as departments will ensure low monetary cost to the university because working

together will definitely help consume time as the issues can be discussed on time without

lagging. On working together, the departments will be knowing the scenario of the entire staff

and if problem persist the staff can look into the issue together and resolve the problem
quickly. Therefore, working together as different departments will really help the university

grow and a positive impact will be seen in each and every aspect.

Section 4: IT installation plan

a) IT Implementation and installation plan

After having a brief idea of the requirements, management of IT staffing, the university

now needs to finally implement whatever strategy is to be applied. According to Tayntor

(2016), careful planning is the basic step towards achieving success of anything the

organisation is trying to newly create. The university’s IT handling staff can categorise the

departments and assign heads to each department that can manage the staff well by providing

proper guidance. The IT implementation should be done in different phases which include

planning, analysis, design, implementation, testing and maintenance. The planning phase of

the IT staffing implementation will involve developing new plans so as to formulate the new

plan for creating dashboards, uploading course contents. The planning phase in the university

will also involve discussion about management of time, the total cost in formulation of the

entire online model, and risks and issues that may take place. The next phase of the IT

implementation involves the analysis of the implementation which focuses on the

requirements and the needs for the designing of the entire concept. The university in the

analysis phase will identify what kind of dashboards, websites and project dashboards are

required with all the content that is to be provided in the online media. The next phase is the

design phase in which the university can start with the designing of portal, websites and

dashboards considering all the requirements of the faculties and the students. The next phase

is the implementation phase where the university’s IT staff have to start with the installation

and testing of the designed online media’s. And the last phase is the maintenance phase

where the software’s and the designed web portals and dashboards are to be regularly
checked, and the department can continue to handle the application, adding new features that

are required, solve the errors that persist and maintain an appropriate database.

b) Scheduled plan (Gantt chart) (150 words)

The Gantt Chart portrays the overall schedule for the planning and implementation of

initiative that is to be initiated by the university. The chart involves the phases in which the

hiring of the IT staff, discussions and meetings by the authorities, dashboard designing,

testing of the application and error detection will be performed.

The budget plans for IT initiatives are too expensive and take a longer duration to be

implemented. The proposed budget plan is as follows:

Class Type Grand Total

Application Development Application for android $8,000

Application for iOS $10,000

Database $40,000

Infrastructure Datacentres $5,000

DR/Backup $10,000

Security $10,000

Student Faculty support and $2,000

feedback

Workstation $15,000

Hardware Systems $15,000

Hardware Devices $10,000

Camera’s and video $12,000

equipment’s

Human Resource Cost Employees for running the $ 20,000

task

Employees for maintaining $20,000

the task

Grand Total $177,000

a) Impact of the new technology on the organisation (225 words)

The new technology here refers to developing the university by involving the concept of

e-education in the university, totally. The university aimed at fully changing the university by

introducing online courses and learning. The online learning always initiate value for learning

with a confirmation to provide respect, fully engage in the material, group work, project

based learning. According to Friedman (2018), the students are choosing online degree

programs, and enrolment in the online programs rose in the recent years. The online

technology enhances the students to put their ideas in front of other students and faculties

freely. This new technology also helps students in organizing their skills, developing learning

practices and working collectively where the students can work, learn together from the

feedbacks and evaluation of their work by the faculties. The student also has a full freedom of

raising query against any issue that persist without hesitating. The major concern of the

university was to provide an atmosphere for the students where they can initiate and work

upon deep learning. The university’s plan of project based learning like Ecole 42, will

definitely provide students with opportunities to enhance their learnings. The new technology

evolvement in the university will definitely be a successful move with the students getting a

good learning which is the ultimate goal of the initiative. More over the students are

preferring the online education comparatively more. With such facilities and benefits in the

university, more students will be interested to enrol and give themselves a chance of refined

and good learning.

b) Disaster Recovery Plan

For a university providing education to thousands of students, it is necessary to plan a

recovery plan in case of any emergency. The disaster recovery planning too involves many

phases of planning. According to Haslett (2019), the recovery plan’s first phase is the
preparation and prevention phase which involves checking of all the devices, check the

viruses and errors on all the devices, may it be a system, hard drive or any other device. This

phase also involves backing up of the data at a safe secure place, and also arranging offsite

storage wherever possible. The second phase involves Pre-recovery which involves assigning

roles to the individuals and the staff members for working on a particular event in case of

emergency. The next step is to choose good locations to continue the tasks at the time of

crisis. This should be a place where the staff can be reallocated during emergency. The

disaster recovery plan needs the general planning of hardware, software, maintenance and

more. The last step is the risk analysis and reduction, this step deals with reducing the risks

and avoiding any interruption in the computing. Davis et al. (2015) states that disaster

recovery planning is an important part in an organisation, where data can be recovered and

the process can flow uninterrupted.

c) Environmental impact and recommendations

The initiative by the university will definitely have a positive impact over the environment.

The project based deep learning will enhance the student skills and students will gain more

knowledge theoretically as well as practically. Educating more students with directly

contribute in the advancement on the environment we all live into. The university aims at

better learning of the students by changing the concepts and reframing them into online

learning. In the previous paragraphs too we have discussed about the growing needs of online

education, thus opting for online education will reduce the impacts on environments such as

pollution, fuel consumption. The offline education concept also requires textbooks, paper,

buildings, electricity while the online education reduces the use of all such resources thus

conserving the natural resources. The online education is thus lays a positive impact on the

society and the environment by reducing many negative aspects such as pollution,
unnecessary wastage of fuel to commute to the universities, reducing the consumption of

natural resources. This concept of education also reduces the consumption of other natural

resources such as paper, electricity etc. Building a university also requires acres of lands,

which ultimately results in afforestation, resulting in pollution and global warming.

d) Conclusion (225 words)

The university is a pioneer in running some online courses at their university, now the

university aims at introducing more online courses for the development of the student skills,

and initiate them for a deep and better learning. The university plans how to move ahead with

the aim of online education. The planning phase involved the staff planning, hiring of the

new IT staff for creating dashboards, websites, practical videos, arranging online and live

sessions by the faculties and guests which will definitely lead to the betterment of the

university with huge number of enrolments and providing a new approach towards learning

using the all new concepts and strategies. a. A new portal for project based learning was also

to be developed as the university aimed at educating their students like Ecole 42. After the IT

staff, the next phase involved creating departments so that all the IT employees can work

accordingly. The phase also involved the budgeting of the entire initiative continuing to

discuss about the measures to be done in case of emergency or some disasters. The impact of

this initiative on the environment has also been discussed in the report.
 References

Friedman, J. 2019. What to expect in an online engineering degree program. Accessed

[online] at https://www.usnews.com/higher-education/online-education/articles/2019-02-

27/what-to-expect-in-an-online-engineering-masters-degree-program

Ogunsakin, T. 2015. The way forward: online and distance learning. Accessed [online] at

https://www.researchgate.net/post/What_is_your_point_of_view_on_online_education_and_t

he_use_of_technologies_for_digital_degrees

Barnhart, C.E., 2016. StaffStuff: A Custom Web-Based Software Solution for Organizing the

Unique Staffing Needs of an Online Education Production Department (Doctoral

dissertation).

Tynan, B., Ryan, Y. and Lamont‐Mills, A., 2015. Examining workload models in online and

blended teaching. British Journal of Educational Technology, 46(1), pp.5-15.

Kauffman, H., 2015. A review of predictive factors of student success in and satisfaction with

online learning. Research in Learning Technology, 23.

Tayntor, C.B., 2016. Successful packaged software implementation. CRC Press.

Friedman, J. (2018). More Students Are Enrolling in Online Courses. Accessed [online] at

https://www.usnews.com/higher-education/online-education/articles/2018-01-11/study-more-

students-are-enrolling-in-online-courses

Haskett, J., & Rohde, R. (1990). Disaster recovery planning for academic computing centers.

Communications of the ACM, 33(6), 652-658.

Allen, I.E. and Seaman, J., 2016. Online Report Card: Tracking Online Education in the

United States. Babson Survey Research Group. Babson College, 231 Forest Street, Babson

Park, MA 02457.

Gillett-Swan, J., 2017. The challenges of online learning: Supporting and engaging the

isolated learner. Journal of Learning Design, 10(1), pp.20-30.

Wiseman, J. and Chan, L.K., 2016. Data dashboards to support facilitating online problem-

based learning. Quarterly Review of Distance Education, 17(3), p.75.

Anstey, E., Fletcher, C. and Walker, J., 2017. Staff appraisal and development. Routledge.

Picciano, A.G., 2016. Online education policy and practice: The past, present, and future of

the digital university. Routledge.

Davis, I. and Alexander, D., 2015. Recovery from disaster. Routledge.