Troubleshooting at the Royal Hotel

NORTHEASTERN UNIVERSITY

(COLLEGE OF PROFESSIONAL STUDIES)

ITC6020

INFORMATION SYSTEMS DESIGN AND DEVELOPMENT

Case-study on

Troubleshooting Information Systems at the Royal Hotel

By: Vertika Tiwari

NUID: 0001645003

May 29, 2016

Table of Contents

Case Overview……………………………………………………………...……………….….3

Discussion question-answers………………………………………………………………….4

Alternative Analysis………………………………………………………………………….….5

Conclusion……………………………………………………………………………………….7

References……………………………………………………………………………………….7

CASE OVERVIEW

Blake Cantera was a MBA student, who got an offer for summer internship at the Royal Hotel. The Royal Hotel is a luxurious hotel in the New York city. Most of the guests here are the businessmen, for whom, the hotel serves as temporary office. Due to this it provides small but highly luxurious and facilitated suits.

A local IT firm Fancy Consultants & Company (FC) assigns Blake a project of consulting the Royal Hotel. This was the Blake’s first project and he had its complete responsibility. After arriving at the hotel, he gets familiar with the circumstances and problems there. The general manager, who is an upfront, old hotelier tells him about the issues of maintenance at the hotel. After communicating with staff and employees, Blake figure out the problem as:

• maintenance management package including issue of quick response logging
• maintenance prevention and reporting.

After consulting director of housekeeping and director of maintenance, Blake suggests implementation of the M-Tech’s Espresso, which is a hotel management software. This product will let housekeepers report room-associated problems and manager need not wait until the day ends for resolving these issues. Thus, the new application Espresso gets introduced in the infrastructure of the Royal Hotel.

However, even before the proper implementation of the process, Blake gets a call from his boss for another project. He leaves this project at the Royal Hotel and another person (his colleague) Jack Scarso takes his role in the project. Blake turned over all his work, drafts and designs to Jack.

Being away from the project, Blake assumed everything is going well at the hotel and never tried to get any update of the project he initiated. After a period of time, he gets a call, which makes him aware of how conditions got worse after he left the project. He didn’t blame anyone, instead he started taking following actions as soon as he came back to the hotel:

• First of all, he noticed, the Espresso machine was lying as it is, no one seems to have used it. The IT director mentioned that the installation and training sessions had been going on, whereas, this was not the reality.
• Some other things, Blake noticed were that employees seem to be working conveniently with the older system, and
• The officials seem to be not interested in the change. Instead, Blake was told to focus on information system and not on the technology.

DISCUSSION QUESTION ANSWERS

1. Despite having relatively little specific information about why the system failed, what do you think are the main reasons for such failure?

According to me, following may be the main reasons of this failure:

• Firstly, I believe the lack of user acceptance testing can be a reason behind this. Since, Blake left the project before its completion, this last phase remained unimplemented. The actual users or end-users didn’t undergo a proper process of getting comfortable with the new product.
• Secondly, the manager was an old man, who may not have sufficient interest in technical makeovers or innovations. This may have resulted in improper formation of user-requirements from people using new product. Implementation f different phases and activities like increased incentives.
• Thirdly, a major cause I understood can be ineffective way of involving staff and employees. Generally, staff or team members should be aware of the outcomes and benefits of their effort. It was the duty of Jack and managers to let people know about how they will be benefited from this project.
• Lastly, officials had to uncover the functionalities in the software which are really needed. These functionalities may include effectiveness of the new product, how it is going to improve the quality of thw work and customer’s satisfaction.

1. How could you fix this problems?

Firstly, it is important that whole management team accepts Espresso System and ensures their commitment towards it. This is important because, Blake or Jack are for a while but these are the people, who are going to work with new product and this needs their cent percent acceptance and commitment. The people includes stakeholders and all the employees of complete hierarchical level because the system needs to be owned and a single person can’t fix the issue.

Moreover, the factors I will consider for the recovery of system are: communication, better relationships among employees and with users, better management (engaging end users and employees, team building activities), regular meetings, testing and feedbacks.

Now, some questions which I will considered while fixing this issue are:

• Why employees stopped using the system?
• Why the directors of maintenance and housekeeping let this happen to employees?
• Why employees preferred old system over the new system?
• How job transitions were assigned and managed?

After analyzing above questions, a report can be formed and reviewed and action plan can be created accordingly.  In my opinion, that report will contain all the solutions and answers to the problem.