Customer Evaluation
Customer Evaluation
The presentation seemed very professional and well executed. We especially enjoyed the flexibility and functionality present in the system. The interface was clutterless and very well laid out. It provided a very efficient mechanism for navigation, without sacrificing utility. The design addressed the spirit of the our original requirement very well: everything has to be flexible and user-friendly. The system was extremely well designed and could easily be implemented as a professional caliber system. The fact that the team was willing to let a member of our committee use the prototype during the demo is a testament to the confidence that the team had in their product. The product looked to be very robust, with no errors/crashes evident during the demonstration. The only complaint regarding the presentation that can be made is regarding the poor quality of the slide show. The presentation could have easily been spiced up with a more dramatic slide show (colors would have been especially nice.) It would be also very nice should the demo team prepare a set of data that helps demonstrate some other "abnormal" scenarios, for instance when there is no room available (but the doctors are.) It would also be a very good idea to demonstrate some error checking capability to prove that the system cannot go wrong. In such a critical environment like a hospital, this is extremely important.
Regarding the functionality of the system, all the key issues were implemented; however, there are some functionalities that appeared not to be implemented such as reports for schedule of nurses/doctors, deletion of nurses/doctors, etc. Acknowledging the fact that this will not be the final product, we are willing to live with this at the moment, but function such as deletion of nurse/doctor is important to the hospital in the long run, and should be included in the final release of the product. One other possible improvement for the final product would be the inclusion of on-line help although it is not in our specification. We also noticed that the product was very consistent with the user manual, and the design team had taken our comments into consideration, which is very good.
Overall, the system is very nice and robust, but it has not fully implemented the system yet. For a "beta" release, this is quite exceptional though. The committee is pleased with the quality of the work and would like to commend every member of the HOSPITAL2000 design team.
Below are the break-down comments on each section besides the general remarks above:
We found the shceduling operation function very user-friendly. The layout of the available doctors/nurses and available times made performing this function quite easy. You simlpy select one or more of the doctors/nurses and then the times that they are available will show up in another list box. After making all selection, you simply click on the OK button to perform the function.
The implementation of this function was well thought out and provided well organized screens. This made it easy to navigate through the system to achieve your goal. Thus the interface for this function was good. The overall look of these screens, color etc... were similar to the windows interface. Thus, giving you the sense of familiarity with the system even though you've never used the system. The system provided all the needs that we have requested for this function. This function was satisfactory.
The interface looks very friendly and easy to understand. Adding and editing staff are quite easy to use. Everything is very impressive, with the exception of some functionalities not implemented as mentioned above.
The system presented many aspects of the patient area of functionality. The interface and the functionality of the system parallel the requirements specified but there were some troublesome areas which require attention. The patient once placed on the waiting list is placed on the bottom of the waiting list and if required, could be moved up on the list by clicking the button "priority" each time until the placement is correct. The problem is when the waiting list has say about 300 patients and so when the patient which has been placed at the bottom of the list needs to be placed in the first position, the user must click the butoon 300 times. This is a flaw which would be necessary to be investigated. The interface was nice but a little confusing in exactly how a task could be performed. Otherwise, the product with relation to patient area was fine.
The Ward/Bed section was designed well and consistently as compared to the rest of the system. The functionality of the system was such that it met the requirements, as specified by we the customer group and signed off on, perfectly doing no more and no less than what was agreed upon. Although in hind sight and after seeing the actual system in action, it would have been nice to see extra functionality such as listing the patients in the Ward/Bed section along with the beds, but as that was not specified, the supplier group is not responsible for it. Overall, the Ward/Bed section of the program, although only a small part of the overall system, was done in a satisfactory manner.
After reviewing the group participation as a whole we have found that there are several areas that were done well, and several that could withstand some form of improvement. We would like to thank our web master Brian for taking the time to assemble all the pages on his own. This took a great amount of time, which Brian was more than happy to commit to the project. On the whole other members of the group contributed their written portions on time, which admittedly helped Brian in his web page construction. After the initial design there was relatively little active creative work to be done. We think that this may have contributed to group apathy as the course progressed. The intensification of supplier group work may also have contributed to this problem.
One of the largest problems during the semester was our lack of a heirarchy for the division of labour. Originally we should have elected a group leader who would then have been recognized as the person to distribute the work more evenly among group members. Another problem dealt with who was repsonsible for which sections of the document. There was no pattern to the assignment of who critiqued which portions of the document, therefore, if a person actually analysed a portion of the system more than once it was through pure chance. This caused a few changes which were then later repealed by our group as the person analizing that portion of the product changed.
We feel that over the course of the semester there were too few meetings to discuss the implementation that had been designed by the supplier group. Our main solution for a lack of meetings was to use email. This tended to create a long drawn out discussion on minor points that could have been resolved quite quickly in a person to person meeting. It would also have helped to have broken into smaller subsections that then reported to a main group leader. Another problem within our group was the number of introverted people our group contained. There were really only three or four people who were not to some extend an introvert. This caused a few problems in the development of our initial design by allowing a select group of people to voice their opinions without any interaction from the other group members. A better mix of introverts and extroverts would have helped us to improve the product in the initial phases.
Communication with the supplier was reasonable on the whole, however there was room for improvement. If we were to do this again we would assign a liason officer for each section who would communicate more closely with the supplier group in order to develope a better understanding of the problems and possible solutions surounding the supplier group. It would also have allowed us to further refine a more concrete modle of what we really needed. A couple of chances to use the suppliers product before it was finalized would have helped to ensure that the product was as close to the specifications as was possible.
The initial design was more or less designed through a group discussion in person. Perhapse for this reason several of our more retiring group members did not actively contribute much to the initial design. Further many people felt that they had other assignments that were more important than ones in this class, and for this reason declined to volunteer for work on initialy unassigned portions of the work. A small quantity of people seemed to do a remarkable portion of the labour. However we were well enough organized to ensure that no section was ever neglected as those who did not volunteer were assigned at least a small portion of the project.