Survey of Software Systems

Week 6 Case Study 1. How important is the reservation system at airlines such as WestJet and JetBlue? How does it impact operational activities and decision making? The reservation system is extremely important to small airline companies such as WestJet and JetBlue. Since these companies are small and fairly new, efficient customer service is essential to their success. When potential customers visit the JetBlue and WestJet websites and view their competitive rates, it is imperative that they are met with a completely capable, efficient information system to book their reservations on.Also, the reservation system will impact operational activities because it clearly lies out how many reservations are currently booked which is essential in deciding on the number of aircraft to use for a specific block of time to a specific destination. It also provides foresight on how much fuel to have on the aircraft etc. Another thing that the reservation system helps is the ability to know when to advertise specials on certain flights in order to fill the roster and offer standby to last minute travelers. 2. Evaluate the risks of the projects to upgrade the reservation systems of WestJet and JetBlue and key risk factors.There are several risks associated with upgrading any information systems within a company. Typically the most difficult tasks involve providing training to the employees that are responsible for using, operating or receiving data from the upgraded information systems. In this situation in particular, one of the major concerns for these companies was that the information system updates would cause defects in the system and also that the time that it would take to upgrade the reservation system could cause a gap in services to the user.An outage in their web services would cause major setbacks for both companies and neither of them could afford the loss. The text states that WestJet had been running practice tests and training for over 100,000 hours in prepara tion for the live upgrade. Still, they encountered some issues that they had not planned for during the live upgrade. This caused the website to be inaccessible for quite some time during and after the upgrade. This caused an enormous number of dissatisfied customers.Users flocked to Facebook and other social networking sites to express their dissatisfaction with WestJet’s services; they also called customer service in an effort to gain a better understanding about what was going on. As a result of the increase in customer service calls that WestJet was also unprepared for, there was a major increase in customer service wait times, which then led to more angry customers. Luckily WestJet was able to redeem itself some time down the road and didn’t take too much of a hit financially because of that mishap.This goes to show that the risks associated with upgrading information systems within a company are extremely high and in no way should they be undermined. Companies sh ould always be prepared when attempting to upgrade information systems otherwise the loss has the potential to be devastating. 3. Classify and describe the problems each airline faced in implementing its new reservation system. What people, organization, and technology factors caused those problems? The problems that WestJet faced in implementing its new reservation system ran the gamut.They had a number of organizational problems which included the fact that they obviously hadn’t considered the possibility that the transfer could not go as planned. Although they trained and practiced for over 100,000 hours in preparation for the transfer, they failed to have a backup plan, which is something that every company needs to have should they need to employ other options. When the initial plan was foiled, there weren’t even enough employees to handle the commotion that the lack of web services caused.They also had a critical technology problem, and that was that the file tra nsfer didn’t go as planned. Another technology problem was that the unsuccessful file transfer caused the web services to be down for a number of hours. There should have been a backup webpage to mitigate that gap in service. JetBlue on the other hand, was very well organized based on the information that the text gave. They had a backup for their webpage that they ended up needing to use because their servers were down due to the file transfer.They chose a low web traffic day to initiate the file transfer; and they hired 500 temporary employees to man the call center in case they had an increased number of customer service calls. JetBlue also had technology problems which caused a delay in their data transfer but the reason that it didn’t affect them as bad as it did with WestJet, is because they were prepared, 4. Describe the steps you would have taken to control the risk in these projects.The risk associated with performing live data transfers is imminent. There wil l never be a way to completely mitigate that risk, but if I were in that situation I would handle it like JetBlue did. I would examine all of the possible outcomes and have a backup in place to control the possible damage. I would have definitely had a backup web interface and I would have hired temporary employees to help with the extra workload. Basically, I would have done the exact same things that JetBlue did.