ICAS5102A Establish and maintain client user liaison

Unit contents

Once the critical business functions have been identified and analysed in a business and an appropriate new system has been implemented you will need to establish and maintain a liaison with the client. This will enable you to accurately assess the required support needs for the new system. To do this you will need to develop support procedures and assign suitably skilled people to the various support roles.

This unit (ICAS5102A) will give you the knowledge and skills to analyse business IT systems and identify and establish appropriate support systems.

Unit topics

1. Determine support areas

In this topic you will learn how to identify and record information technology used in the organisation. You will also learn how to identify stakeholders of the system, understand the organisational structure, culture and politics in relation to support requirements in order to be able to determine what level of support is required by each organisational unit.

Activity 1.1 Identify information technology

Read the scenario and answer the questions that follow:

Scenario: 4Sale Books Pty Ltd is a bookstore located in the Adelaide central business district. The business occupies two levels of an office building connected by escalators and lifts. 4Sale Books employs approximately six sales staff, one manager, one administrative officer, a bookkeeper and a marketing manager. They have an Ethernet network consisting of six PCs, two switches, a router and three printers. They use the SlowBooks software to manage their entire business, including sales, inventory, ordering, accounts receivable, accounts payable, payroll and employee management. They also have two EFTPOS terminals (one on each floor).

4Sale Books has a Linux server that stores all of the data (including the SlowBooks database). The server is backed up to tape regularly. They also have a website on which customers can browse the product catalogue and view current specials. They also lease a telephone system from NWR Telecoms. The phone system consists of a main switchboard and five remote phones with three incoming lines and a message-on-hold queue system.

Q: List the technology in use in 4Sale Books and consider the following:

• What sort of support does the technology require?
• Who is likely to provide this support?
• Does the support arrangement already exist?

Present the analysis in a table such as the one below. Some rows have been filled in as an example to assist you.

Table 1: Technology analysis

A: This following table is a technology analysis that explain about

Table: Technology analysis

Activity 1.2 Identify stakeholders and project sponsor

The questions that follow are based on the organisational chart shown below:

Figure 1: Organisational chart

Q1. If you were building a website for the organisation represented by the organisational chart provided above, who would you identify as the stakeholder in this project?

A: All the staff in the organisation is need to be including in the stakeholder there are consiting with the business owner, the relevant manager, the local workers, and the remote workers as they either affect the project or are affected by it.

Q2. If you were building a website for the organisation represented by the organisational chart provided here, who would you identify as the project sponsor?

A: The project sponsor in this case is the business owner.

Activity 1.3 Identifying support requirements

Q: If you were implementing a website for a customer that consisted of a large number of static and dynamic web pages such as an electronic store with a database backend, what possible support functions could you implement?

A: I am going to implement the following support functions:

• maintenance of content
• writing new content
• checking of links
• database administration – (eg. users, security, backup, recovery)
• version control
• uploading of new content
• troubleshooting site and server based problems
• customisation of site
• web programming
• user and administrator training

2. Develop support procedures

In this topic you will learn how to verify support needs, establish support procedures and write a service level agreement to meet customer expectations.

Activity 2.1 Customer support procedures

Q: Think about one positive and negative assistance with a telecommunications company an ISP or a computer supplier. What support aspects were professional and unprofessional in each? (Your experience may be via telephone, email or even voice recognition). Think about the following question: How long did the support process take? Were the steps logical? Did they solve your problem? Was the call deflected to another area? Can you think of a strategy to deal with the negative service situation that you described?

A: In my case, i made a call to ask iinet that is my ISP about how to set up my internet connection with new modem. In that case i had talk with a technician support that told me how to set up with step by step. There was very easy for me to follow but that is not success in the first time. So, i have to try again with another way to done set up step that took my time nearly 45 mins. All that period, the technician support was try to suggest and help me to do set up step with a very gentle and genetic voice that make me feel so great. because, i was not to understand quite well in English but he was explain again and again or try to choose easy word to talk with me until we were finished set up.

3. Assign support personnel

In this topic you will identify IT skills required to assist each organisational unit with support activities and assign personnel according to human resource processes. You will also learn how to provide support using agreed procedures and obtain regular feedback on allocated support.

Activity 3.1 Skills categories

Complete the online matching activity on skills categories


Activity 3.2 Review job placement ads

Q: Log on to an online recruitment site such as https://jobs.nsw.gov.au. Look at how their advertisements are written for IT roles and non-IT roles. Are the ads effective? What could be improved? Select two or three samples and analyse them. What is it that makes them effective/ineffective?

A: Most of the ads are have a similar requirement as the following:

• language
• length of ad
• jargon
• skill mix (is too much expected?)
• sales pitch (did it motivate or excite you?)
• title (did it grab your attention?)
• positioning (was it the first on the list or 131^st?).