Administration
70-358-01 Accounting & Information Systems
Winter 2013 – Assignment “Bodgett and Panik LLP”
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• You must submit your case via e-mail in Word or PDF files. Paper
submissions will not be accepted.
• It must be received by ***************by
midnight on March 26, 2013. Paper copies will not be
accepted.
• No extensions will be granted under any circumstances. Any submission
received after this date will not be marked and will receive a mark of zero.
For this reason, you are encouraged to submit your case at least 24 hours in
advance, and request a “delivery receipt” when you do so.
• Students should make a team submission (3-5 students per team – you
are responsible for forming your own teams). You are strongly encouraged to
have at least one team meeting to brainstorm and discuss ideas. When submitted,
the assignment must clearly state the names of all students who participated in
it, and all should be cc’d on the e-mail sending it to the instructor. All
students who participated in a specific submission will receive the same mark
for the assignment.
Marking
• This case study represents 15% of the final grade of the course.
• An average standard of professional communication is expected.
However, additional marks may be added for a reply that is well reasoned and
clearly laid out – or up to 5 marks deducted for a reply that is not up to such
a standard.
• 1 mark is available for each relevant point made. However, the case
will be marked out of 50 marks. Additional marks over 50 (ie. >100%) may be
awarded at instructor’s discretion for strong submissions that address many
points, or that raise valid points not covered in the model answer.
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Context and requirement:
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You are Sam Itsmart, a professional accountant in
a growing practice in a mid-size Ontario town, with a specialty in IT matters.
On Monday morning, you receive a v-mail from your
boss Sydney, which is as follows: “Hi Sam, I’m sending you an e-mail which has
a transcript of a phone interview with Darren Panik. Actually, it’s more of a
monologue, but you’ll get the idea. Darren is a lawyer who’s in partnership
with one other lawyer. He’s an old school friend of mine but I haven’t heard
from him in several years. Sounds like they need our help, big-time. Please
could you review the transcript then come chat with me.”
The transcript is attached. After reviewing it,
you and Sydney agree that you need to:
–
Identify what specific things went wrong here, and the possible
implications. You have agreed a preliminary list of key areas of concern, as
follows:
oProjectmanagementandoversight
oSystemtestingandconversion
oLikelyongoingissueswiththesystem
oSecurityanddataintegrity/continuity
–
Consider other possible things that Darren needs to think about – either
IT-specific, or broader business issues that become apparent from the
information you have. Your notes can include further questions where you feel
you will need further information.
REQUIREMENT: Prepare some working notes for the meeting that address
the above. The notes should expand on the above and provide talking points for
the meeting, as well as remind you of the key points you want to cover. They do
not have to be in a formal memo or letter, and can be in bullet point form, so
long as clearly understandable. However, bear in mind when preparing them that
Darren may ask to take a copy away with him.
Instructor guidance:
–
This assignment builds on – but is not limited to –some of the material
in the Romney text.
–
Notwithstanding the submission date for this assignment, you are
encouraged to scan the remaining chapters (and related slides) of the text for
ideas that you may feel are relevant. All slides are posted under the
“Resources” tab on CLEW.
–
Put yourself in the position of a professional advising a client. For
this reason, do NOT restrict yourself to the course text. Any other relevant
material or comment that could add value to your client’s situation is
appropriate. You are welcome to include comments or suggestions from the
internet or other sources, but should credit the source if it is not drawn from
the course textbook. Some of the points in the model answer derive from common
sense or a basic awareness of business issues, as much as course-specific
technical material.
–
In business, brevity, clarity and relevance work in your favour. Do NOT
include information simply for the sake of providing a long answer. Given the
format, 2- 3 pages of material (plus cover page and any acknowledgments) will
be a reasonable length. Additional material that is drawn from the text book
but is not relevant or not applied to the scenario will not gain points, and
may cause points to be deducted.
Transcript of phone interview with Darren Panik
DARREN: “Syd,
thanks for helping us out. To be honest, we really need your help. This thing
has been a complete disaster for us – we’ve spent a lot of money for something
that doesn’t work right, we have a lot of angry clients, we have upset staff,
and now we might have a professional complaint filed against us for breach of
confidentiality. I tell you, this has taken years off my life.”
SYDNEY:
“Darren, obviously I’m sorry to hear this. Tell me more. How did you get into
this mess?”
DARREN: “I guess in hindsight Les [Bodgett, Darren’s partner] and I
should have kept a much closer eye on Mary. But she has been with us – and the
partner we bought the business from – for 40 years, and has been our office
manager for 20 years, and nobody knows how this place better than she does. She
knows how to get whatever information Les and I needed out of our old system,
so we figured she could handle the changeover to the new one. But she really
dropped the ball on this one – it’s cost lots more money than it should have
done, it came on-line right in the middle of our peak time, and as I said it
doesn’t do what it should do.”
SYDNEY: “What is this new system supposed to do”?
DARREN: “Oh,
it’s the core of our whole office management. At least, it should be.
Timesheeting and client time records, account billings and cash posting, trust
account management. Payroll and payables are linked in somehow as well, I don’t
quite know how that bit works.”
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SYDNEY: “How much involvement did you have in the
project?”
DARREN: “Obviously not enough. But we had a
meeting with Mary upfront and agreed what the system needed to do that our old
system couldn’t, gave her a budget, and told her to check in with us at least once
a month on it. Next thing I knew, we were signing the big check to a vendor I’d
never heard of, but apparently Mary’s friend – who runs an architecture
practice – has used them and raved about them. And the check was just the first
of several – there were unexpected things cropping up all over the place, all
of which cost money. New hardware, which was apparently part of the deal, new
maintenance and service contracts, you name it. And we still haven’t had the
training we paid for – everybody has been too busy just surviving.”
SYDNEY: “So you say it doesn’t work.”
DARREN: “Well, that’s the understatement of the
century. First of all, it never turned on when we turned the old system off and
it took several days to get the old system back up. In our peak season, we had
to go back to a paper-based system – in the 21st century, I ask you! It was all
we could do to get the work out of the door, let alone bill the clients, so our
cashflow took another hit. Then, when the new system did come on stream…. Oooh
boy. It’s been a disaster. First of all, we can’t seem to get the reports we
want. Then, it turns out we didn’t bring over all the data we needed from the
old system – so customers would pay bills and we had no record of the bill, if
it was sent before we changed over – or it was credited to the wrong customer’s
account. Then… odd things would happen, which have me really worried.”
SYDNEY: “Such as?”
DARREN: “Well, I’ll give you a couple of
examples. Mary was tied up trying to sort out this mess, so I decided to do my
own bills. I raised an invoice in the system for one of my bigger customers,
but then I noticed it had not reported all the time I knew full well I had
booked to that client code. So I deleted the original invoice and tried again.
When I tried to create the new invoice… it was as if that client never
existed. No record of it anywhere. Our IT consultant who installed it muttered
something about having “anomalies with your foreign keys” but I have no clue
what that’s supposed to mean. And I’ve got a printout on my desk here that says
that I posted time to a client account on February 31st. How on earth does that
happen?”
SYDNEY: “I’ve got some ideas, but we’ll cover
them when we meet. You mentioned a possible professional complaint. That sounds
nasty. What’s the story?”
DARREN: “Ah. That’s a completely different issue
and I don’t know how it happened. I think it is probably totally separate from
the new system, but I’m not sure. You know how we have a secure part of our
website, which only our clients can access, where we post information for them
to retrieve? Well, somehow, one of our clients got hold of information
belonging to another client and was able to read it.
I have no idea how, as it was encrypted – in
fact, we have to send them a file so they can unlock the encryption. But it
happened, and now the one client is threatening action against me personally
for breach of confidentiality.”
SYDNEY: “Who hosts your website?”
DARREN: “I
think it’s actually run off our server, in my basement.” SYDNEY: “Say what?”
DARREN: “Oh, sorry. We didn’t have enough
physical space in the office for the new server it turned out we need. So it’s
been installed in my furnace room at home until we can sort out the space. At
least that doesn’t seem to be causing any problems.”
SYDNEY: “OK, that’s a lot of stuff to think
about. How can I help, Darren?”
DARREN: “I think we need to stand back and do a
hard look at what went wrong, and what it could mean. This professional
complaint has me really worried. Between you and I, the only chance Les and I
have of surviving an investigation by the Law Society is to demonstrate that
we’ve worked out what went wrong and have already fixed it. But I dread to
think what else could happen that I just haven’t found out about yet.”
SYDNEY: “I’m sorry we have to catch up under
these circumstances. I’ll talk to my IT expert Sam about this, and we’ll come
over to talk through this on Thursday afternoon. See you then.”
