Proposed Fact Finding Techniques

Published Date: 02 Nov 2017

Introduction

First of all, let us define ‘on leave’, it means absent with permission from work or duty. There are many ways or method taken by organization to manage their employee’s leave. We would like to briefly list out several types such as e-leave, ecoleave, OLAS web-based Online Employee Leave Application System, VCU Leave Request System and et-cetera.

Besides, e-Leave automates the HR administrative tasks and provides flexibility in allowing you to define various leave types including Annual Leave, Sick Leave, Maternity Leave and etc. By using the system, management can reduce a lot of costs and time and eliminates human errors, leave planning made easier, instant retrieval of leave balances and improves communications between employees. In addition the system are easy to setup and user friendly, unlimited employees creation and access, Auto Calculate Leave Entitlement and Multi-Levels Leave Approval.

Gamuda Berhad, listed on the Main Board of Bursa Malaysia, is the leading infrastructure and property developer with operations in Asia and the Middle East Regions. Focusing on three core businesses in Engineering and Construction, Infrastructure Concessions and Property Development, we take pride in having delivered numerous large-scale civil infrastructure projects to-date; operate and maintain 230km of highways that serve more than two million road users each day; provide water supply to more than two million Klang Valley residents daily; and built more than 14,000 homes in our integrated lifestyle townships.

They have transformed communities with mega developments such as the internationally-acclaimed Stormwater Management and Road Tunnel (SMART) in Malaysia; the Kaohsiung Metropolitan Mass Rapid Transit (KMRT) in Taiwan; Sitra Causeway Bridges in Bahrain; Dukhan Highway and New Doha International Airport (NDIA) in Qatar; Durgapur and Panagarh-Palsit Expressways in India, as well as Gamuda City and Celadon City in Vietnam. The number of employee in the Group and in the Company were 1309, therefore the good managed leave application system is needed in order to increase their productivity.

FEASIBILITY STUDY

Operational feasibility study is the measure of how well a proposed system solves the problems and takes advantages of the opportunities identified during the scope definition and problem analysis phases. And how well it satisfies the system requirements identified in the requirement analysis phase. By using leave application system, Gamuda Berhad would enabled client staff to apply for leave requests to which they were entitled and this situation could bring conveniences to company.

By using the system, management can reduce a lot of costs and time and eliminates human errors, leave planning made easier, instant retrieval of leave balances and improves communications between employees. The company can avoid a lot of problems such as human error and time consuming to processing the application. By using the system, employee could get their result in next minute when the management approved and this will make company running efficiently especially for those who going to take emergency leave and they can just can get their approval for the next minutes.

In addition, the system are easy to setup and user friendly, unlimited employees creation and access, therefore, potential users of the system are familiar with the system, hence training up to necessary level would be easy and security issues authorization and audit procedure will be facilitated to the system administrators.

Technical feasibility study is a measure of the practicality of a specific technical solution and the availability of technical resources and expertise, the leave application system will be developed in web-bases completed and it is required to use web technologies appropriately. Technology to build the overall system is available.

Besides, maturity of system is mature enough to used since over 50% of the server in the world are Apache. The system software sources are availability widely and knowledge is freely available through the internet. The system does not possess the required expertise to complete the system, but it is possible to expertise the technologies, in the given period of time. Gamuda Berhad using the system integrated real-time with SAP ECC 6.0 and it allowed advanced routing and re-routing options. In addition, Leave application system interfaced with the corporate Lotus Note SMTP email service for notification generated via emails to relevant parties. The system catered to 26 leave types across 4 leave schemes and it is NET 3.0 framework with ASP.NET and VB.NET , SAP .NET connector, SQL Server 2005 Database and Reporting Services and K2 Workflow. Since Gamuda Berhad is a infrastructure company, is a technology services and outsourcing company, they should possesses technical expertise, therefore, it is feasible to develop a leave application system.

Economics feasibility study is the most frequently used method for evaluating the effectiveness of a new system. More commonly known as cost-benefit analysis, the procedure is to determine the benefits and savings that are expected from a candidate system and compare them with costs. If benefits greater than costs, then it is feasible to implement the system. This is an analysis of the time required to achieve a return on investments.

By using the system, the benefits that Gamuda Berhad can get from the system as following: conduct better efficiency and effectiveness in the leave maintenance and calculations in the leave system thus reducing human errors. Besides, it can save in time and paper cost of manually entering data and generating reports thus improving communications. Reduction in relevant cost and storage space such as labor cost as fewer employees would be needed in entering the data into the system to processing the information and personal information and would be easily managed by the database. In addition, the system can easier the management and improved employee services such as efficiency in applying leaves, obtain their leave information quickly and obtain other details relating to their no pay days, short leave and half days from the website.

On the other hand, we can divided the cost in to the few categories for the leave application system which are development the purchasing costs such as hardware and software, installation and data entry costs such as install the system and training the staff, operational costs such as maintenance of the system, upgrading the software and personnel costs such as maintenance staff cost and operational staff cost.

Projected development cost for leave application system:

Reason

System analysis’s cost RM4/hr x 250hrs

RM1000

Programmers RM6 x 200hours

RM1200

Database administrator RM6/hr x 70hrs

RM420

Training for staff/ maintenance staff

RM2500

Hardware and software

RM3800

Total

RM8920

Projected annual operating cost for leave application system:

Reason

Maintenance of the system

RM3500

Upgrading the software

RM2000

Total

RM5500

As we can seen that system could bring a lot of benefits to company after implement the system and the most important is company can run smoothly after using the system and this will led company’s productivity, employee are more structured in their management, therefore there is feasible for company by using leave application system.

Proposed Fact Finding Techniques

Fact finding is the formal process of using techniques such as interviews and questionnaires to collect facts about systems, requirements, and preferences. There are many occasions for fact-finding during the database system development lifecycle. However, fact-finding is particularly crucial to the early stages of the lifecycle including the database planning, system definition, and requirements collection and analysis stages. Throughout the database system development lifecycle, the database developer needs to capture facts about the current and/or future system. A database developer normally uses several fact-finding techniques during a single database project. There are five commonly used fact-finding techniques: examining documentation, interviewing, observing the enterprise in operation, research and questionnaires.

Examining documentation can be useful when we are trying to gain some insight as to how the need for a database arose. We may also find that documentation can help to provide information on the part of the enterprise associated with the problem. It used to describes problem and need for database, the part of the enterprise affected by problem and the current system. Online leave application system…….

Interviewing is the most commonly used, and normally most useful, fact-finding technique. We can interview to collect information from individuals face-to-face. There can be several objectives to using interviewing, such as finding out facts, verifying facts, clarifying facts, generating enthusiasm, getting the end-user involved, identifying requirements, and gathering ideas and opinions. Online leave application system…..

Observing the Enterprise in Operation is one of the most effective fact-finding techniques for understanding a system. With this technique, it is possible to either participate in, or watch, a person perform activities to learn about the system. Online leave application system…..

Research is a useful fact-finding technique is to research the application and problem. Computer trade journals, reference books, and the Internet (including user groups and bulletin boards) are good sources of information. They can provide information on how others have solved similar problems, plus whether or not software packages exist to solve or even partially solve the problem. Online leave application system…..

Questionnaire is another fact-finding technique is to conduct surveys through questionnaires. Questionnaires are special-purpose documents that allow facts to be gathered from a large number of people while maintaining some control over their responses. Online leave application system…..

Proposed Fact Finding Techniques

Fact finding is the formal process of using techniques such as interviews and questionnaires to collect facts about systems, requirements, and preferences. There are many occasions for fact-finding during the database system development lifecycle. However, fact-finding is particularly crucial to the early stages of the lifecycle including the database planning, system definition, and requirements collection and analysis stages. Throughout the database system development lifecycle, the database developer needs to capture facts about the current and/or future system. A database developer normally uses several fact-finding techniques during a single database project. There are five commonly used fact-finding techniques: examining documentation, interviewing, observing the enterprise in operation, research and questionnaires. It may use either one or all techniques for the system, therefore, we choose interview, questionnaire and investigation for our leave application system.

Interview

Interview is the most commonly used and normally most useful in fact finding techniques. This technique is used to collect information from individuals or groups who are related to the system. And we had choosing our company employees to implement the interview session. The objectives of using this method are to find out facts, to verify facts, to clarify facts, to generate enthusiasm, to getting the end-user involved, to identify the requirements, and to gather the ideas and opinions.

Interview can either be structured interview or unstructured interview. For structured interview, it is a formal interview where the interviewer has a specific set of questions to ask the interviewee. Open-ended questions allow the employees free to answer the question. From that, we can get extra and different information and employees’ feelings or attitudes towards an issue. For instance, what is your opinion of our company leave application system? Whereas the closed-ended questions are restrict answer to either specific choices response. We are easier to analyze because the answer is limited and simply as the employees no need give their opinion. For example, do you think supporting document is necessary for the online leave application? The employees only require choosing ‘yes’ or ‘no’.

On the other hand, unstructured interview is more or less like a casual conversation where in-depth areas topics are covered and other information apart from the topic may also be obtained. This type of interview frequently loses focus and not reliable. Therefore, it often does not work well for database analysis and design.

The advantages of having this technique are through interview we can observe the employees body language. It also allows the employees feel freely to answer the question. And we can follow up the interesting comments made by the employees. However, interview technique is very costly and time-consuming. And it requires good communication skill in order to deal with the employees whose have different perceptions.

Interview is not always the best method for all situations but we had success to implement the interview by choosing our company employees and preparing extensively for the interview and conduct in an efficient and effective manner.

Questionnaire

Another fact-finding technique we choose is through questionnaires. Questionnaires are special-purpose documents that allow facts to be gathered from a large number of people while maintaining some control over their responses. The questions are simple, clear, to the point and the questions are framed together in logical manner. This method can be adopted and used only by a skillful analyst. The questionnaire can be conducted through face-to face, web-based, telephone or mail. As we company have mailed to our employees to implement this technique.

There are two types of questions can be asked in questionnaire technique; it can be either free-format questions or fixed- format questions. For free-format questions, it offers the employees freedom in answering the questions. For instance, are there any problems with our company’s leave application system? The employees explained in details if they faced with the problems. With their answer, we have upgraded and improve the system and try to settle the problems faced by the employees.

On the other hand, fixed-format questions require specific responses from individuals. The employees must choose the answers that have been provided. This makes us easier to tabulate and analyzed. For instance, do you agree if the online leave application system provides email notification for approval of the leave? The employees only need to answer from a range of responses including ‘Disagree’, ‘Strongly disagree’, ‘No opinion’, ‘Agree’ and ‘Strongly agree’. We have faced with the problem such as central tendency when the employees answer their questions as no opinion.

There also having pros and cons by using this technique. The pros of questionnaire are the employees can complete and reply the questionnaire at their convenience. And this technique can save our company expenses as it sent through email which is an inexpensive and easy way to gather data from a large number of people about their perception on leave application system. We also can easier our work as the software program can analyze results and generate the reports, therefore we could gain a lot of information and to get the feedback about using the system.

Whereas the cons of having this technique are we cannot observe and analyse the employees’ body language while they answer the questions. The employees may return the incomplete questionnaire. And this technique also may limit the employees because it requires access to computers and may not capture unintended consequences.

Investigation

Investigation is the act of discovery and analysis of data. Many different problems or situations will lead organization to start an investigation such as attitude problems, safety problems, workplace theft and so on. As our company have investigated the leave apply by the employees in order to avoid employees make fraud. For instance, an employee who mentioned he/she is sick. But actually, he/she is not sick. Therefore, in order to get an accurate data, we have to examine both quantitative and qualitative hard data.

For quantitative data, the documents are available for interpretation and have a specific purpose. We have to find employees personal record file to ensure whether the employees still available for the leave. And check the attached documents that submitted by the employees to make sure employees are not fraud. If there have no doubt, the leave will approved by Human Resource Manager. In addition, management would investigate or refer to their available record and to make decision such as the distribution of salary, management could calculate the salary based on employee’s attendance by refer to their leave had applied before.

While for the qualitative data, it include email messages, memos, sign on bulletin boards and in work areas, Web pages, procedure manuals, and policy handbooks. Many of these documents are rich in details revealing the expectation for behaviour of other that their writers hold and the ways in which users expect to interact with information technologies. By using the system, our company may instruct employees not to apply leave at the one shot time, this will lead company shortage of labour, therefore, company might provide a memo to inform their employees and revealing the expectations for behaviour of employees.