ACCT 20051/20077: Practical and written assessment
| Due date: | Thursday of Week 7 [11:45pm [AEST] 28 April 2016] |
ASSESSMENT |
| Weighting:
|
20%
|
Part B |
Objectives
This assessment item relates to the course learning outcomes 1, 2, 3, and 4.
Details
The assignment must be completed as an individual assignment. There is a specific writing style and required to write an executive report. Word limit is 1500 words. Please do not repeat the question in your answer, and simply provide the answer.
Students are not allowed to either directly or indirectly contact the companies for which annual reports are used in this assignment. Students are also not allowed to contact analysts directly or indirectly to gather information and/or advice about this assignment. Students must base their analyses purely on the information that is provided on the company’s website and/or on the Australian Stock Exchange.
In all your calculations, show the absolute figures from the financial statements. Also support any arguments with absolute figures from the financial statements.
Retain a copy of your assignment for your records.
Don’t:
- Spend time unnecessarily paraphrasing any information provided in the course material and textbooks.
- Just simply identify and mention the issue. You need to elaborate on it, explain exactly what you mean and justify your arguments with the help of literature where appropriate.
Academic Learning Centre (ALC)
It is highly recommended to seek help and guidance from the ALC as early as possible, especially if English is not your first language. The ALC can help you with the written communication by checking your assignment for grammatical correctness and that your arguments are logical. They will also help you to ensure that you understand the questions and answer them by applying theoretical knowledge in answering the questions. You will not receive any marks if you make generic, theoretical, vague and stray claims and statements without applying them to the particular situation.
Allocation of marks
Please use the marking criteria sheet as a guideline for how marks will be allocated. You will note that marks are allocated for referencing as it is expected that you do research in this assignment. If you choose to support your answer with using the work of others, please ensure that you use the correct referencing style (Harvard referencing style) as stated in the Course Profile.
Formatting
Please keep in mind that marking is done in soft copy, hence allocating marks for the formatting. To obtain these marks, ensure you comply with the following:
- Font: Time New Roman, 12 point, 1.5 line spacing
- Document submitted onto Moodle must be in Word format, allowing the marker to use track-changes to provide comments and indicate where you received marks. Please do not submit a pdf document or copy from another source such as for example include screen shots of calculations done in excel. The track-changes function cannot be used to do the marking in these and hence only information created in Word will be marked.
- Page: portrait orientation
- Footer: Your full name and student ID, page number and number of pages (i.e. Pat Bird s0123456, page 1 of 3)
- Marking criteria sheet is completed and attached as the first page of the assignment.
Please note: 2 marks are allocated for complying with formatting and submission requirements.
Plagiarism
Work submitted by a student that is the work of another person with no referencing or acknowledgement is considered to be plagiarism. If plagiarism is suspected, your assignment and results will be withheld and a Plagiarism Incident Report (PIR) lodged. You will then receive notification from the University with details of the necessary course of action.
Submission requirements
You must submit your assignment Word document electronically through the secure upload facility in the Moodle system. Please do not email your assignment to your lecturer or the Course Coordinator. Please ensure you add your student name and your student ID in the marking criteria sheet and ensure that it is the FIRST page of your assignment. Word limit is 1500 words. Also ensure you include your student ID and name in the file name when you save the document, and ensure that you include the appropriate .doc or .docx at the end. For example, save your file name as: Pat Bird s0123456.docx
Assignment question
Your task is to compare and contrast the historical (for the last 2 years – 2014 and 2015) and expected future performance of Wesfarmers Limited (a listed company) and Woolworths Limited (a listed company) a competitor in the same industry, and present your findings in the form of an executive report which will cover quantitative performance elements in a logical cohesive format. (Word limit is 1500 words). Please use the figures provided in the most recent annual reports. You must use the ratios and formulae given in chapter 8 of the prescribed textbook. Show all the formulae and absolute figures used in calculating all the ratios as an appendix. You do not have to show any graphs to illustrate trends in the ratios. Show ALL your calculations. You will note marks are provided for correct figures. Partial marks can only be provided if you provide your workings and the marker can identify where you went wrong in the calculations.
The executive report based on quantitative analysis should include (but is not constrained to):
- An executive summery
- A brief introduction on each company including how they are placed within the industry.
- An initial analysis of trends in the items contained in the profit and loss statements, balance sheets and statements of cash flows; appropriate relevant ratios measuring Profitability (Return on Assets and Net Profit Margin), Liquidity (Current Ratio and Quick Ratio), Capital structure (Debt to Equity Ratio and Equity Ratio) and Market performance (Earnings per share and Dividend per share).
- A highlighting of the most important changes within these ratios and an identification of the reasons for these changes. A comparison of the quantitative analysis for the two companies on Profitability, Asset efficiency, Liquidity, Capital structure an identification of the reasons for any differences.
- Conclusions – You should include a conclusion in which you comment on the strengths and weaknesses of your overall analysis encompassing what your analysis has accomplished and what are its limitations.
- Recommendation.
Taking into account the quantitative analysis, you are required to make a recommendation which will fall into one of the following three categories:
1. Invest in the company
2. Invest in the competitor
3. Invest in neither
When you prepare the executive report based on quantitative analysis, you will be able to get some important data and information from following web sites (but is not constrained to):
Industry standards – from the IBISWorld website http://clients1.ibisworld.com.au
ASX 2015, ‘Woolworths Limited’ http://www.asx.com.au/asx/research/company.do#!/WOW
http://www.woolworthslimited.com.au/
ASX 2015, ‘Wesfarmers Limited’ http://www.asx.com.au/asx/research/company.do#!/WES
http://www.wesfarmers.com.au/
Student name
|
Student ID
|
||
|
Marking Criteria Sheet: ACCT20051 and ACCT20077 |
|||
| Word count | Allowed |
Actual |
|
|
1500 |
|
||
|
Marks available |
Marks awarded |
||
| Knowledge and understanding |
10 |
||
| Reasoning and analysis
Profitability analysis: two ratios (1.25 marks for each ratio, 0.625 marks per year for correct figures) Liquidity: two ratios (1.25 marks for each ratio, 625 marks per year for correct figures) Capital structure: two ratios (1.25 marks for each ratio, 625 marks per year for correct figures) Market performance: two ratios (1.25 marks for each ratio, 625 marks per year for correct figures) |
50 |
||
| Writing skills and presentation |
10 |
||
| Cohesiveness |
10 |
||
| Referencing, use of references and background reading |
10 |
|
|
| Submission requirements |
10 |
|
|
| Assignment total marks |
100 |
|
|
| Assignment Total out of 20 marks (20%) |
20 |
|
|
MGMT20131 – Organisational Governance and Leadership
Assessment Item 1 – Individual written assessment – Understanding yourself as a leader
Note: You must read and understand all information in this document. If you do not understand anything, please speak with your on-campus lecturer/tutor or if you are a FLEX student contact the course coordinator directly: Dr Laura Baker ([email protected]); ph: 47265327. We are here to help and support you in any way we can.
| Due date: | Week 7 Saturday (30-Apr-2016) 05:00 PM AEST |
ASSESSMENT 1 |
| Length: | 1500 words ± 10% (excluding title page, references and appendices only) | |
| Weighting: | 30% | |
| Reference style: | CQU American Psychological Association (APA) | |
| Document type: | MS Word or pdf documents only |
Aims:
This assessment item aims to develop the following learning outcomes as stated in the course profile. The ability to:
1. Recognise the contribution made by leaders in different organisational settings, and to understand the characteristics of successful leaders.
2. Understand the principles underlying leadership development and good governance.
5. Discuss the role of leadership in ensuring the good governance of organisations.
6. Discuss different theoretical approaches and models in the study of leadership and governance.
Purpose:
The purpose of this assessment item is to increase your awareness of your self as a leader through reflective practice and the stimulus of a case scenario. It provides you with the opportunity to practice and improve skills related to research, analysis, critical thinking, problem solving, and academic writing. You are expected to analyse yourself as a leader and reflect on the problem presented in the case study by using, and correctly citing, a range of relevant scholarly literature. This literature must be used to justify and support your reflection on your leadership practice. In doing so you are expected to use appropriate conventions of reflective essay writing: structure, language, length and tone. You’ll also be expected to appropriately use the American Psychological Association (APA) referencing system which will be quite new to many of you.
Details:
Assessment Item 1 requires the writing of a reflective essay (1500 words +/- 10%, excluding the title page, reference list and appendices). The assignment should contain a coherent, but necessarily restricted review of the academic literature on leadership topics in question. The literature review should be integrated into the assignment and not be a separate section. A reference list formatted in the prescribed APA style is compulsory. Further information regarding formatting of assignments and other information is available at https://www.cqu.edu.au/student-life/services-and-facilities/referencing/cquniversity-referencing-guides
This assessment item requires you to research to enhance your understanding of and utilisation of academic literature. Whilst you should AVOID using only the textbook for the course (Leadership: Theory, application, & skill development, by Lussier & Achua, 2016), it should be cited in regard to broad leadership principles. You will be expected to present information and evidence from, and cite, at least eight scholarly sources that includes three peer reviewed journal articles (absolute minimum requirement). Although these may include other academic sources such as books on specific leadership topics, chapters of edited books and so on, it is highly recommended that you use peer-reviewed journal articles. The quality and number of citations will demonstrate the breadth and depth of the literature used to support your arguments. Your marker is interested in the analysis that you developed from YOUR review of the literature and how well you use the literature to discuss the topic.
A good guide would be to use some recent references (ideally some of these would be journal articles from 2010-2015) in your discussions. The reference lists found in your prescribed textbook, as well as other texts, are good places to start when searching for relevant journal articles. Reliance on websites or textbooks only is NOT an appropriate academic literature search and will not help you to achieve higher marks and/or grades in this course. What is required in this assessment is a critical evaluation of the academic literature as it relates to the specific details of leadership practice.
Task:
The assessment item is based on the case study titled “Chris Peterson at DSS Consulting” (the case in available on Moodle). You should carefully read the case and imagine yourself in Chris Peterson’s position. At the end of the case Chris is asked “if she was prepared to lead the group in a new direction or if she would be more comfortable and successful returning to the IT practice as a functional specialist?” Your task is to reflect upon what your knowledge of yourself as a leader indicates you would do next if you were Chris Peterson.
During the Saturday workshop/s covering Topics 1, 2, 3, & 4, diagnostic tools and reflection activities will be undertaken to enable you to understand your self-confidence and emotional self-awareness as a leader through accurate self-assessment. Your task is to use the results of four of these tests to reflect on the decision that you will make as Chris Peterson. The results of the workshop diagnostic tools and reflection activities must be included in the appendix of the essay.
For example, you might choose to use the results of the Emotional Intelligence Questionnaire from Topic 1; the Managerial Leadership Skills self-assessment from Topic 2; the Job Motivators and Maintenance Factors self-assessment from Topic 3; and the Leadership Style Your Fiedler LPC from Topic 4 to learn more about yourself and what you would do next in Chris’s position.
This is an example only the diagnostic tools and reflection activities that you use are your choice. The marker will be interested not so much in which you choose but in your understanding of the concepts tested and what your results mean for your leadership practice.
Reflection is all about deepening your learning. By reflecting, you are able to:
- get to know your own strengths and weaknesses,
- discover your own underlying assumptions – and challenge them,
- make connections between your own experience and what you are learning learn from your mistakes – and thus become a better practitioner.
To learn more about reflective writing read the ‘Reflective Writing’ document available on the Moodle website.
Organisational Governance and Leadership
Following the guidelines of the course ID guidelines
Student’s Name
University
A great leader must have the knowledge and skills to control a diverse workforce. It is the communication skills and the relationship building capability of the leaders that leads to their success. The case study has taught me various lessons regarding the role of a leader. It helps me to answer the most important question in the business world, i.e. how the workforce is responsible for the success of an organisation. It is important to keep in mind that the ability of the leader in controlling a diversified workforce is the key to success for an organization. Along with that, it is important for any organization to focus on a particular goal on a whole in place of having respective goals of every individual (Charbonneau, 2014). The paper has been developed to present my knowledge on the case study and say what I would have done if I was in place of Chris Peterson. Hence, the paper presents the problems faced in the case by Chris Peterson and what should be done to overcome those problems depending upon the personal skills and knowledge of an individual. The paper presents the case analysis and a self reflection that will present my views on the case study and also present my capabilities to be a perfect leader.
The case study has been significantly delivered to show how lack of communication effort with other teams within an organisation can work against a human resource. The administrative practice of DSS Consulting Company has been featured in the case study to define how organisational strategy has restricted the functionality of the workforce (Segev & Gray, 2009). The case study has shown the determination of a challenging role of a team member in order to develop a project. Under the leadership of Meg, Chris has started a project that has been given to her. Meanwhile, it has to be mentioned that, Chris has ignored the value of building good relationships with cross-functional teams operate within the organisation. Moreover, to be confident, Chris and her team have shown the potential to complete the given task on time. Invariably, the approach of Meg in the consequences can be termed as partial as at the crunch time, Meg has failed to provide the necessary support to Chris and her team members. Most of the time, Meg has appreciated the performance of the team (Shapira-Lishchinsky & Levy-Gazenfrantz, 2015). In meantime, concerning about the expectation of the project, Meg has announced that the scheduling and funding to the project will not be continued for much further. Invariably, the management has made the decision to call off the project as the administration has doubted the success of the project in the larger districts. In the current situation, if I was in the position of Chris, I would decide to lead the group towards a new direction. In the underlying section a description of the following situation has been made (Davidson, 2012).
If I would have been in the position of Chris Peterson, I would have chosen the option of moving ahead towards a new direction. It can be seen from the case study that Chris has several deficits in her leadership skills. She was unaware that there is a need to build good relationship with the members of other departments to complete a project maintaining a common goal for the organisation (Pučėtaitė, Novelskaitė, & Markūnaitė, 2015). The role of management is quite effective in maintain a common goal. It is important for the management to motivate the team members to concentrate on a common goal that will help to improve the performance of the individuals as well as the organisation itself. The assessment of the issues faced by Chris will help to learn what mistakes can be committed while working in team and what should be avoided to be an effective team leader. Along with that, the case study also helps to understand the decision making strategy that must be used to seek success in a diversified workplace (Howell & Higgins, 2010). Finally, the case study gave me the knowledge of leadership skills that will be helpful to develop myself as an effective leader. A broad discussion has been made to present what i have learned from the case study, and how will I apply those learning in the future.
It is important for a leader to have proper communication skills. There is a need to build a good relationship with the members of the team as well as with the members of other teams in the organization. Being in the position of Chris Peterson, I would try to maintain a good relationship with the members of other teams by interacting with them on a regular basis. I will try to connect with them over the social networks to build personal relationships. Along with that, I would promote my team members to interact with the other people and develop a good relationship with them. Relationship building communication helps to share views and ideas. It also helps to align a particular goal for the organization (Oskamp, 2015). Hence, it is important to maintain a proper communication strategy to develop good relationship with other members and seek success in a diversified organisation.
The role of management is most important in building a good team and developing their skills. It is the role of the management to motivate the team members to work towards a common goal. Being a leader, I must have proper management skills and play a role of motivator to engage the team members to achieve a common goal (Suciu, 2014). I will interact with the team members to observe their views and solve the problems they face during the regular operations. My skills and experience in conducting team project will be helpful to deliver my roles and responsibilities as a team leader (Carmeli, Atwater, & Levi, 2010). After accessing the issues, it can be seen that she was unable to interact with members of other team. Hence, being in her place, I will maintain a good relationship with others that will help me to get the support of other teams and help me to get ideas from others in completing my projects. The mistakes committed by Chris must be taken as lesson to improve personal skills and tactics in delivering a better team performance (Jermier, 2013).
On a particular condition such as this, decision making strategy must be identified as one of the key aspects to set the goals aligned to the requirement of the firm. Personally, I believe that building relationship and the role of the management would not do the necessary tasks. To ensure the performance of the team members, as a leader significant decision making strategy can be utilised to make a real impact on the performance of the team members. I would also focus on sharing ideas among the team members so that the corporate culture can be involved within the team members. Apart from that, leading from the front to tackle any obstacle can define the role of a strategic leader (Carmeli & Waldman, 2009). In the given case study, it has been seen that the team of Chris has significantly lacked to develop any solid correlation with other organisational team. As a result of the consequences, in case of project shut down, the team of Chris has not got additional support from the other teams. Hence, it would be ideal for a leader to promote good relationship with other organisational teams so that in dire state other groups can support the activities. Clearly, it is the responsibility of the leader to pull the team members towards the same direction inside an organisation.
The major problems that have been identified in the case have illustrated how better communication with other team members can drive a workforce to get acknowledgments in case of difficult situation (Lengnick-Hall & Lengnick-Hall, 2013). The lack of leadership tactics and decision-making capability of Chris can be recognised as the cause of downfall of the team. On the position of Chris, I would show extreme level of efforts to the other organisational teams so that in case of difficult situation such as this case, they can stand by to show their support. The project has been suspended due to the doubts of its market success (Kast & Rosenzweig, 2013). But the reasons for the decision can be figured out effectively using leadership talent. In the course of the case, other organisational groups have been seemed hostile and quite unwilling to help out the team members of the Chris. As a mature leader, I could employee constructive feedbacks to other organisational human resources so that maximum support can be gathered from different positions. In the meanwhile, I would accept the situation and reassign my group to the new direction.
In accordance with the resources based model using sustainability of valuable assets such as workforce, effective leaders can deal with any types of situation. As far as my leadership as well as management skills are concerned, I would recommend following inspirational work culture by developing influential work relationship with organisational employees and groups. In this way, a group leader can set ideal strategies to the team members to be followed. In case of pressure situation or wrong management decision-making, the organisational relationship can be effectively utilised to get the required help.
References
Carmeli, A. & Waldman, D. (2009). Leadership, behavioral context, and the performance of work groups in a knowledge-intensive setting. J Technol Transf, 35(4), 384-400. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10961-009-9125-3
Carmeli, A., Atwater, L., & Levi, A. (2010). How leadership enhances employees’ knowledge sharing: the intervening roles of relational and organizational identification. J Technol Transf, 36(3), 257-274. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10961-010-9154-y
Charbonneau, D. (2014). Influence tactics and perceptions of transformational leadership. Leadership & Organization Development Journal, 25(7), 565-576. http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/01437730410561459
Davidson, A. (2012). Counter-culture tactics for nurturing innovation. Strategy & Leadership, 30(6). http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/sl.2002.26130fae.001
Howell, J. & Higgins, C. (2010). Leadership behaviors, influence tactics, and career experiences of champions of technological innovation. The Leadership Quarterly, 1(4), 249-264. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/1048-9843(90)90004-2
Jermier, J. (2013). Leadership and information processing: Linking perceptions and performance. The Leadership Quarterly, 4(1), 109-113. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/1048-9843(93)90007-g
Kast, F. & Rosenzweig, J. (2013). Contingency views of organization and management. Chicago: Science Research Associates.
Lengnick-Hall, M. & Lengnick-Hall, C. (2013). HR’s role in building relationship networks. Academy Of Management Executive, 17(4), 53-63. http://dx.doi.org/10.5465/ame.2003.11851841
Oskamp, S. (2015). Overconfidence in case-study judgments. Journal Of Consulting Psychology, 29(3), 261-265. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/h0022125
Pučėtaitė, R., Novelskaitė, A., & Markūnaitė, L. (2015). The Mediating Role of Leadership Relationship in Building Organisational Trust on Ethical Culture of an Organisation. ECONOMICS & SOCIOLOGY, 8(3), 11-31. http://dx.doi.org/10.14254/2071-789x.2015/8-3/1
Segev, E. & Gray, P. (2009). Integrating an Expert System and DSS for Strategic Decision Support.Information Resources Management Journal, 2(1), 1-13. http://dx.doi.org/10.4018/irmj.1989010101
Shapira-Lishchinsky, O. & Levy-Gazenfrantz, T. (2015). Authentic leadership strategies in support of mentoring processes. School Leadership & Management, 35(2), 183-201. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13632434.2014.992777
Suciu, L. (2014). The Role of Communication in Building the Pedagogical Relationship. Procedia – Social And Behavioral Sciences, 116, 4000-4004. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.sbspro.2014.01.880
Executive Summary
The two companies Westfarmers and Woolworth are leading Australian companies operating supermarkets retailing groceries and day to day household items. The aim of this study is to look at their financial performance over the last two years through the means of ratio analysis and other tools to investigate which stock is a better buy. Also recent developments within the industry and the performance of the companies are evaluated and taken in context before arriving at a decision.
About the Companies
Woolworths is Australia’s largest supermarket chain. It has almost 1000 stores across Australia and employs more than 110,000 staff in its stores, distribution centres and offices. Woolworths core competency is in insuring freshness of its products which it maintains by sourcing fresh fruit, vegetables and meat through farmers and growers. (Woolworth, n.d.) Woolworth main sales are in groceries and alcohol and it is the market leader in this segment.
Headquartered in Western Australia, West farmers is in a wide array of business which spans supermarkets, alcohol, hotels and convenience stores. In addition, they are into manufacturing of chemicals, fertilisers, industrial and safety products as well. They have interests in energy and coal as well. Their employee base is 210,000 and shareholder base is approximately 500,000. (Westfarmers, n.d.)
Of late both the stocks haven’t been doing well owing to the slow growth in their industry and increased competition and shrinking margins.
Financial Analysis
As seen from the financial statements of the annual reports of the two companies it is observed that with marginal increase/ decrease in net sales the industry can be said to be in a phase of slow to medium growth. While Westfarmers has a relatively large asset base that of Woolworths is considerably smaller, even though the sales volumes of the two companies are identical. On one hand where Westfarmers reported a 4 percent increase in revenues on the other hand Woolworth reported a decline of 0.2% in revenues. EPS of Westfarmers registered a drop of almost 9 percent whereas that of Woolworth showed a marginal decline of 0.7%. While Westfarmers has a relatively large asset base that of Woolworths is considerably smaller, even though the sales volumes of the two companies are identical. Woolworth reported increased sales in all its divisions and the overall decline in revenues was due to the considerable decline in revenues from its oil division. If the group sales were to be taken in account excluding petrol it would have shown a 2% increase in revenues in 2015 as compared to 2014.
But similar operating profits and net profits also indicate that in spite of being an asset heavy company Westfarmers is still a profitable company.
A ratio analysis has been carried out to better understand the financial situation of both the companies across various aspects.
Ratio Analysis
Profitability Ratios:
Return on Assets: Given by the formula Earnings before Interest and Taxes (1-Tax Rate)/ Total Assets (Damodaran, 2002)
| Company | 2014 | 2015 |
| Westfarmers | =3566(1-0.3)/39,727
=6.28% |
=3759(1-0.3)/40,402
=6.51% |
| Woolworth | =3775.2(1-0.3)/24136.5
=10.94% |
=3322.5(1-0.3)/25336.8
=9.17% |
Woolworth shows a far higher return on assets vis a vis Westfarmers. But whereas ROA for Westfarmers has shown a slight increase from 2014 to 2015 Woolworth has shown a considerable decline. Westfarmers asset base is huge and hence that explains the higher ROA for Woolworths.
Net Profit margin: Given by the formula Net Income before non-controlling interest, equity income and non-recurring interest/Net Sales (Gibson, 2012)
| Company | 2014 | 2015 |
| Westfarmers | 3566/60181
=5.92% |
3759/62447
=6%
|
| Woolworth | 3775.2/60868.8
=7.79% |
3322.5/60952.2
=5.45% |
Again, we observe the same trend as with Return on Assets. The fall in profitability ratios of Woolworth is because due to a fall in oil prices margins shrunk for Woolworths in its oil division thereby affecting the total bottom line as well.
Liquidity Ratios:
Current ratio: Given by the formula Current Assets/Current Liabilities (Stickney, et al., 2009)
| Company | 2014 | 2015 |
| Westfarmers | 9311/8229
=1.13 |
9093/9726
=0.93 |
| Woolworth | 7106.1/7489.5
=0.95 |
7660.9/9168.6
=0.84 |
Current ratio hints at the debt servicing capacity of a company and we observe that whereas both the companies show a decline in 2015 over 2014. This is mainly due to increase in current liabilities of Woolworth mainly on short term loans taken by Woolworth. Same is the case with WestFarmers as there is an increase in short term loan taken by them. Bajkowski (1999) observes that a high number for a current ratio is not necessarily good because “too high a ratio may point to unnecessary investment in current assets or failure to collect receivables or a bloated inventory, all negatively affecting earnings”. A ratio of 1 is considered a benchmark across industries.
Quick Ratio: Given by the formula Quick Assets/Current Liabilities. Generally quick assets would be current assets minus the inventory. (Stickney, et al., 2009)
| Company | 2014 | 2015 |
| Westfarmers | =9311-5336/8229
=0.48 |
=9093-5497/9726
=0.37 |
| Woolworth | 7106.1-4693.2/7489.5
=0.32 |
7660.9-4872.2/9168.6
=0.30 |
Quick ratio or Acid Test ratio is a better measure of a firm’s capacity to serve its short term liabilities as it takes the inventory out of the equation and only considers the most liquid current assets.
The drop is significant for Westfarmers since their cash position is affected from 2014 to 2015 hence hindering their ratio. Both the companies have a quick ratio in the range of 30-40% which indicates quite a high investment in inventory which is understandable given the nature of their business.
Leverage ratios:
Debt to equity ratio: Given by the formula Total Long-Term Debt/Shareholder’s equity. (Gibson, 2012)
| Company | 2014 | 2015 |
| Westfarmers | 4320/25987
=0.17 |
4615/24781
=0.19 |
| Woolworth | 4135.6/10252.5
=0.40 |
3078.9/10834.2
=0.28 |
While Westfarmers has increased its leverage Woolworth has considerably reduced its leverage. That is because it’s long term debt has reduced by almost 25%
Equity ratio: Given by the formula total Equity/Total Assets (Gibson, 2012)
| Company | 2014 | 2015 |
| Westfarmers | 25987/39727
=0.66 |
24781/40402
=0.61 |
| Woolworth | 10252.5/24136.5
=0.42 |
10834.2/25336.8
=0.43 |
Since Westfarmers has a large asset base and an issued capital almost 4 times as large as Woolworths hence the huge difference in the ratios of the companies.
Earnings per share: Given by the formula Net Income-Preferred Dividends/no of shares outstanding
Values obtained directly from annual reports
| Company | 2014 | 2015 |
| Westfarmers | 234.6 | 216.1 |
| Woolworth | 196.5 | 195.2 |
Dividend per share: Given by the formula Total Dividends paid/No of shares outstanding
| Company | 2014 | 2015 |
| Westfarmers | 200 | 200 |
| Woolworth | 137 | 139 |
Conclusions
While the financial ratios can give a fair idea about the financial position of a company across various aspects by converting a lot of complex data into simple numbers they do not necessarily tell us everything. Two of their biggest disadvantages as per Oysazar (2012) is that they are obsolete in the sense that since they are derived from financial numbers put in at the beginning of the year end, towards the year end they might no longer hold any significance. Secondly they convert a whole lot of data into just a simple ratio or percentage. While simplification of data is one of the biggest strength of ratios it is their biggest weakness as well since they might miss the bigger picture and not present an accurate view to the users of financial statements. Hence the users of these ratios will do well to use them as an investment guide and not as sacrosanct.
Recommendation
The current share price of Westfarmers is 41.82 AUD and that of Woolworth is 21.770 AUD; using it we further calculate the following values:
P/E ratio given by Current Market Price/ earnings per share
Price to book ratio: Market price of share/Book value of share
Book value further obtained by dividing total equity with number of shares outstanding
This is a good indicator to gauge whether the stock is overvalued or not. A number above 1 hints at overpriced stock.
| Parameter | Westfarmers | Woolworth |
| P/E ratio | =41.82/2.161
=19.35 |
=21.77/1.952
=11.15 |
| Price to Book ratio | 2.90 | 2.73 |
| Dividend Yield | 4.83% | 5.27% |
Even though West farmers is in sound financial shape but the Price to Book ratio clearly shows that it’s overpriced since it is quite high than 1.P/E ratio is higher than the industry average and Dividends Yield is low. Keeping these factors in mind it is has to be said right now West farmers is not a good buy. Even though Woolworth PE ratio is lower but still the high price to book ratio indicates that it is grossly overpriced as well. The dividend yield for both the companies is reasonable but since on year to year basis they haven’t shown much growth in terms of sales and operating revenues, the high price to book ratio cannot be justified. In the wake of increasing competition from foreign entrants and shrinking profit margins the industry can expect further turbulence in the future for sure. (Smyth, 2015) Hence, right now it has to be said that neither among the two seems a good investment.
References
Bajkowsi, J., 1999. FINANCIAL RATIO ANALYSIS: PUTTING THE NUMBERS TO WORK. AAII.
Damodaran, A., 2002. Investment Valuation: Tools and Techniques for Determining the Value of Any Asset. s.l.:John Wiley & Sons.
Gibson, C. H., 2012. Financial Reporting and Analysis. s.l.:Cengage Learning.
Oysazar, H., 2012. Advantages and Disadvantages of Financial Ratios. [Online]
Available at: http://yourbusiness.azcentral.com/advantages-disadvantages-financial-ratios-1679.html
Smyth, J., 2015. Foreign competitors sour Australian grocery sector. Financial Times, 17 June.
Stickney, C. P., Weil, R. L., Schipper, K. & Francis, J., 2009. Financial Accounting: An Introduction to Concepts, Methods and Uses. s.l.:Cengage Learning.
Westfarmers, n.d. Westfarmers. [Online]
Available at: https://www.wesfarmers.com.au/about-us/about-wesfarmers.html
Woolworth, n.d. Woolworths Fresh Food People. [Online]
Available at: http://www.woolworthslimited.com.au/page/Who_We_Are/Our_Brands/Supermarkets/Woolworths/
Practical Assessment
| Assessment Title | Methodology |
| Task Description
Assignment Overview This assessment item requires you to consider:-
…you must then write a 2,000 word ESSAY describing and justifying a high-level project management methodology that could be applied to a project from a selected case study. The case study will be supplied for a range of project domains:-
You are encouraged to use assignment outputs that you may have developed from previous assignments and courses, as examples in the appendix of your essay. Task Your task is to consider the domains above and write an ESSAY illustrating and explaining a methodology for the project from one case study. Your methodology must explain and justify itself within the context of the case study using the course and peer reviewed material. You are encouraged to review Kerzner Chapter 21 and chapter 5 of the PMI Implementing Organizational Project Management for an indication of the context and content of your methodology. You will be graded upon how complete your methodology is. The justifications that you provide and how well you argue that it reflects the requirements of the organisation in the case study that you select. Purpose The primary purpose of this assessment item is to help you to develop skills in the contents and compilation of a methodology. The secondary purpose of this assignment is to give you the opportunity to consider the role of a methodology within the strategic project management plans of a selected organisation. The assignment will also give you the opportunity to enhance your analysis and written communication skills; particularly in the areas of structured assignment writing. Essay Structure Your submission should be made using Microsoft Office documents and the essay submitted as a separate 2,000 word Microsoft WORD document. You should describe all of the required parts of your methodology in as complete manner as you deem appropriate. A range of sample methodologies will be identified for you to study during the course. If you wish to include examples of any parts you may do so in an appendix. You must not include pictures or diagrams in the body of the essay. You must provide an ILLUSTRATION OR DRAWING OF YOUR METHODOLOGY in the appendix of your essay. Your essay should be a properly constructed academic essay. It should contain an effective introduction, body and conclusion. The introduction should introduce the essay and include your argument. The body should present the evidence you have collected to support your argument, and the conclusion should restate your argument, summarise the evidence and make a conclusion regarding your argument. The essay should contain a coherent, but necessarily restricted review of the academic literature on the project management topics in question. The literature review should be integrated into the essay, not a separate section. Do not include an executive summary or an abstract. A reference list formatted in the prescribed Harvard style is compulsory. Do not include a bibliography. This assessment item involves researching your assigned topic to enhance your understanding of project management concepts and utilisation of academic literature. Whilst you use the recommended textbooks you may also refer to relevant peer reviewed, academic journal articles. You will be expected to present information and evidence from, and cite, at least (the minimum requirement is from the course resources but you twenty (20) times can use other PEER REVIEWED sources in addition). |
|
| Assessment Due Date | Week 9 Friday (13-May-2016) 11:45 PM AEST |
| Return Date to Students | Week 12 Friday (03-Jun-2016) |
| Weighting | 25% |
| Assessment Criteria
Your assignment will be assessed on the extent and quality to which it meets each of the following criteria.
|
|
| Referencing Style | Harvard (author-date) |
| Submission | Online
The essay must be submitted as a Microsoft Word document file. |
| Learning Outcomes Assessed | This section can be expanded to view the assessed learning outcomes |
| Graduate Attributes | This section can be expanded to view the assessed graduate attribute |
Crowd Sourcing and Waterfall Project Management Methodology
Name of the Student
Name of the University
1. Introduction:
The study comprises of the description regarding the software development in a crowd sourcing with the water fall project management methodology. In the broad variety of domains such as design and sales the adoption of the crowd sourcing can be seen. The clients and the developers can come across each other through a crowd sourcing platform. Amazon Mechanical Turk or AMT is a popular crowd sourcing platform (Good and Su 2013). InnoCentive deal with innovation project and problem solving are cases of crowd sourcing complex jobs.
The waterfall model is also referred to as the liner sequential life cycle model as the linear activities are aligned in the project management methodology in a sequential manner (Kounina et al. 2013). Regarding a software development the waterfall model was the first model to be used.
2. Software Development in Crowd Sourcing with Waterfall Model:
Several cowed sourcing platform was particularly aiming at the software development. TopCoder is one of the most popular crowd sourcing software development platforms which comprises of five lakhs of members. The definition of the crowd sourcing based software development is that it is an act activity of consuming a task conventionally achieved by an elected agent or an employee and outsourcing the outcome of the task to a large group of persons in a form of an uncluttered cell. In some way, the crowd sourcing may present itself as an open sourcing or out sourcing (Poetz and Schreier 2012). There are some confusions regarding the relation between the crowd sourcing and pen sourcing. Some argue that open sourcing is the genesis of the crowd sourcing, and some say it is not a form of crowd sourcing. In software based crowd sourcing development the incentive based contents create many issues. The entities of the crowd sourcing development are nature of work, state of control and workforce’s nature. The nature of work describes that the software development jobs are full of complexities with various interdependencies. In addition is not same as the easy HIT or intelligent human task which is performed at the AMT (Good and Su 2013). Sate of control describes that the task is specified by the customer organization. The integration of the outcome is done in the organization’s software development activity. The Workforce’s nature is a huge and critical undefined group of outdoor person. The group of external persons has a deep and broad specialized knowledge that assist them to carry out the job successfully. From the above discussion the definition of the crowd sourcing. Regarding an organization, the accomplishment of a particular software development through a distinctive and huge group of undefined external persons who have sound knowledge for carrying out the task through an open cell (Satzger et al. 2013).
There are some key concerns which have to be considered while developing software on a cowed sourcing platform. One of the key problems in the crowd sourcing that the job gets divided into several small pieces (Zhou et al., 2015). The outsourcing scenarios most of the time face it. In comparison with the independent and small process of the AMT, the software development tasks are interdependent and complex (Huhns, Li and Tsai 2013). Decomposing the software development job into smaller tasks is the key to the success regarding a crowd sourced development. The responsible person must provide an excellent description of the task while decomposing the software development job (Mao et al. 2013). Establishing a proper communication and coordination are another issues that can harm the development task. The coordination and communication are essential to the development job because in order to achieve the objective the individual tasks must be lined. Coordination also defines the success regarding the interdependencies. It is essential that the persons who submit the divided tasks have to a part of the crowd sourcing organization. The Brook’s law defines the requirement of the communication among the various developers. The tasks are carried out in parallel and independently by the responsible developers (Bayus 2013). There remain some uncertainty regarding the timely delivery of the product. For that reason, planning and scheduling become a vital concern regarding the development. If the product is delivered on time but not with a good quality, then the response from the customer organization will not be satisfactory. Keeping the focus on that quality and timely delivery both re essential regarding a software development (Zogaj, Bretschneider and Leimeister 2014).
TechPlatform Inc. is a worldwide platform which provides services and solutions through the cloud. The number of the employees of TechPaltfrm are tens of thousands. The organization also comprises of four-hundred sales offices, and it has partners in around seventy-five countries (Saxton, Oh and Kishore 2013).
TopCoder refers to the platform through which TPI is crowd sourcing its software development. In between 2004 and 2014 the organization has grown from fifty-thousand to six lakhs and twelve thousands of employees. The list of blue chips organizations is the customer of TC. Software development, front-end innovation algorithms, and analytics are the features that the TC platform offers. Via a sequence of competitions, TC accomplishes the task of the software development (Tung and Tseng 2013). For acting as a communication channel between the developers and the co-pilots are assigned. It is the responsibility of the Program Managers to choose the co-pilots. Furthermore, monitoring the customer projects is another crucial job of the program managers. The co-pilots must have proper experience as TC community member. For delivering the product successfully, the co-pilots handles the technical parts of running and crafting competitions. The figure 1 in the Stol and Fitzgerald (2014) indicates the TC’s competitive categories and stages. The hierarchy of the competitive types is such as co-pilot selection, design, UI development, development, quality assurance and maintenance. The UI development and development occur in parallel. On the other hand, the quality assurance and maintenance are carried out simultaneously (Li et al. 2013).
The objective of the study is to inspect crowd sourcing within a software development background. The analysis has to be conducted on the basis of the customer viewpoint. It will provide a better view in order to recognize the challenges and activities which are associated with the development activity. For gathering the vital and relevant information semi-structured and face-to-face interviews have been conducted with the key informants. The informants were involved with the TC crowd sourcing ingenuities (Tung and Tseng 2013).
From the gathered information it has been derived that the work decomposition of the TC and TPI are such as automation tests, front end, and back end. The front end comprises of planning, importing, reporting, scripting and modeling (Agerfalk, Fitzgerald and Stol 2015). The option for the task decomposition was to determine the aspects of the products which were perfect for the crowd sourcing and were not completely inconsequential for the TPI. It will be a huge issue if the code from TC has to be directly merged. From the TopCoder view, the activities that are related to the software development comprises of a quantity of interrelated stages (Li et al. 2013). The TopCoder activities are typically a waterfall. Though it also incorporates the scrum project development methodology. Establishing the proper connection between the two project management methodologies is a major issue. TPI comprise of tactical scrum team which is assigned to various jobs for more flexibility but the not to the long term projects. For the long-term and vital projects, the organization always go for the waterfall life cycle model (Garrigues et al. 2013). The involvement of the tactical scrum team is not necessary for the projects where the normal scrum team is assigned. The Titan project included more than fifty TC competitions. Over an average period of thirteen days of completion days, the project incorporated a total amount of six hundred and ninety-five contest days. The shortest completion days were four days. On the other hand, the longest completion days were thirty days. The complete development of the Titan project was carried out in thirteen days. Each of the phases took eighty days on an average. The low-end legacy and third-party arrays were the shortest development which took sixty-nine days. In addition with that, front-end HTML panels at the first phase were the longest development aspect which took ninety days. Table 2 in the Stol and Fitzgerald (2014) hold the list of the periods regarding each stage. It also holds the competition at each stage and the average period of competition as per individual stage. The figure 3 in the Stol and Fitzgerald (2014) provides the information regarding the planning of all the stages. It also represents the dependencies among the several contests. Regarding TPI, some of the few granularity of likely choices and the timings for TopCoder development were an issue. Taken as an example, TopCoder offered five days of time to accept or reject the deliverable (Li et al. 2013). Often it generated some issues from the customer’s end at the given time was not enough for the client to examine and test the deliverables. Another issue regarding the deliverables that it has to be accepted or rejected as a whole. TPI often accepts the defected codes from the developers as they did intend to discourage TopCoder developers from bidding in the future competitions (Mao et al. 2013). Another problem regarding the planning and schedule occurred when TPI had to delay the product delivery for finishing contents; it does not matter if the main aspects of the software are still evolving. It created many problems regarding the integration (Agerfalk, Fitzgerald and Stol 2015).
The advanced research regarding the software engineering has concentrated on detecting and eliminating errors as soon as possible within the development activities. If any error is found in the development process, the project becomes more costly. It is because the waterfall model does not support adding new features in the middle of the development. After the completion of the coding part, the structure of the TPI pushes the QA related concerns near the back-end of the development activity (Agerfalk, Fitzgerald and Stol 2015). As per the development manager, the activities or the crowd sourcing concentrates on needs and relaxes the quality activities at the onset of the project. Because of this, all the importance regarding handling the quality of the product comes under the QA sequences at the last stages of the project (Tung and Tseng 2013). In addition, it inclines to become more costly. As per the information provided by the architect involved in the project, the absence of penetration in the communication between the contestants reflects that there is the limitation to the quantity of carry-over knowledge. Though some contestants take part in various contests, they will not be able to construct a knowledge based domain with the efficiency as the internal person can. It would not be difficult for TopCoder to claim that it comprise of deep and broad skill for making sure of sound competition rate with the development community of half million members (Mao et al. 2013). TPI would definitely be one of the most popular organization worldwide based on the fact that it used the pseudonym. The pricing structure of the Titan project was complex. A considerable fact is that the Titan project successfully formulated the waterfall project management methodology (Corominas et al. 2013).
3. Conclusion:
The study concludes that the proper use of the waterfall lifecycle model can provide the satisfactory outcome. The waterfall model offers the opportunity to subdivide the task and control over the small tasks. The Proper period can be given to the developers by the organization as the lifecycle model breaks down the development phases. In spite of the discussed advantages, the life cycle model also comes with some unwanted drawbacks such as no partial solution can be constructed until the completion of the development. Furthermore, high amount of risks and uncertainty remains in the project because of the utilization of the waterfall model. The model divides the complete project into six stages. TPI provide deliverables to the clients before initiating the project. It would have been easier if some aspects of the deliverables could be accepted or rejected. Regarding a software development, crowd sourcing software development is an emerging and distinct activity. An unknown assortment and scaled third party get involved in the crowd sourcing in contrast to conventional outsourcing strategies.
References:
Agerfalk, P.J., Fitzgerald, B. and Stol, K.J., 2015. Not so shore anymore: the new imperatives when sourcing in the age of open. InProceedings of the 23rd European Conference on Information Systems.
Bayus, B.L., 2013. Crowdsourcing new product ideas over time: An analysis of the Dell IdeaStorm community. Management Science, 59(1), pp.226-244.
Corominas, L., Foley, J., Guest, J.S., Hospido, A., Larsen, H.F., Morera, S. and Shaw, A., 2013. Life cycle assessment applied to wastewater treatment: state of the art. Water research, 47(15), pp.5480-5492.
Garrigues, E., Corson, M.S., Angers, D.A., van der Werf, H.M. and Walter, C., 2013. Development of a soil compaction indicator in life cycle assessment. The International Journal of Life Cycle Assessment, 18(7), pp.1316-1324.
Good, B.M. and Su, A.I., 2013. Crowdsourcing for bioinformatics.Bioinformatics, p.btt333.
Huhns, M.N., Li, W. and Tsai, W.T., 2013. Cloud-based software crowdsourcing (dagstuhl seminar 13362). Dagstuhl Reports, 3(9).
Kounina, A., Margni, M., Bayart, J.B., Boulay, A.M., Berger, M., Bulle, C., Frischknecht, R., Koehler, A., i Canals, L.M., Motoshita, M. and Nunez, M., 2013. Review of methods addressing freshwater use in life cycle inventory and impact assessment. The International Journal of Life Cycle Assessment, 18(3), pp.707-721.
Li, K., Xiao, J., Wang, Y. and Wang, Q., 2013, July. Analysis of the key factors for software quality in crowdsourcing development: An empirical study on topcoder. com. In Computer Software and Applications Conference (COMPSAC), 2013 IEEE 37th Annual (pp. 812-817). IEEE.
Mao, K., Yang, Y., Li, M. and Harman, M., 2013. Pricing crowdsourcing-based software development tasks. In Proceedings of the 2013 international conference on Software engineering (pp. 1205-1208). IEEE Press.
Poetz, M.K. and Schreier, M., 2012. The value of crowdsourcing: can users really compete with professionals in generating new product ideas?. Journal of Product Innovation Management, 29(2), pp.245-256.
Satzger, B., Psaier, H., Schall, D. and Dustdar, S., 2013. Auction-based crowdsourcing supporting skill management. Information Systems, 38(4), pp.547-560.
Saxton, G.D., Oh, O. and Kishore, R., 2013. Rules of crowdsourcing: Models, issues, and systems of control. Information Systems Management,30(1), pp.2-20.
Stol, K.J. and Fitzgerald, B., 2014. Two’s company, three’s a crowd: a case study of crowdsourcing software development. In Proceedings of the 36th International Conference on Software Engineering (pp. 187-198). ACM.
Tung, Y.H. and Tseng, S.S., 2013. A novel approach to collaborative testing in a crowdsourcing environment. Journal of Systems and Software, 86(8), pp.2143-2153.
Zhou, D., Liu, Q., Platt, J.C., Meek, C. and Shah, N.B., 2015. Regularized minimax conditional entropy for crowdsourcing. arXiv preprint arXiv:1503.07240.
Zogaj, S., Bretschneider, U. and Leimeister, J.M., 2014. Managing crowdsourced software testing: a case study based insight on the challenges of a crowdsourcing intermediary. Journal of Business Economics, 84(3), pp.375-405.
Assessment details for all students
Assessment item 2—Assignment 2
| Due date: | 6:00pm, Friday Week 10 |
ASSESSMENT |
| Weighting: | 20% |
2 |
| Format: | Submit one file online as .doc, .docx, .rtf or .pdf |
Assessment criteria
- This assignment must be typed, word-processed or clearly hand-written (since the assignment must be submitted electronically as a single file) and an appropriate equation editor should be used. Important note: There is no need to include the text of the assignment questions in your submission.
- Microsoft Excel allows students to cut and paste information easily into Microsoft Word documents. Word also allows the use of Microsoft Equation Editor to produce all necessary formulae (use of these are recommended).
- It is expected that Excel would be used to assist in statistical calculations for questions in this assignment. Where Excel is used, use copy function, “Snipping tool” or similar to cut and paste relevant parts of the spreadsheet to verify that you have done the work.
- For those questions where Excel is not used, all formulae and working must be included to obtain full marks.
- Only one file will be accepted in any of the formats mentioned above. No zipped file or any other file extension will be accepted.
- There will be late submission penalty for submissions beyond the deadline unless prior approval is obtained from the Course Coordinator through the extension system in Moodle. Under no circumstances any submission that is late beyond 14 days from the deadline will be marked, or get any score other than zero.
Assignment markers will be looking for answers which
- demonstrate the student’s ability to interpret and apply the statistical techniques in the scenarios and
- use statistical techniques as decision making tools in the business environment.
Full marks will not be awarded to answers which simply demonstrate statistical procedures without comment, interpretation or discussion (as directed in the questions).
Plagiarism
CQU values academic honesty. Consequently, plagiarism will not be tolerated in assessment items. This assignment must be completed by each student individually.
Question 1 4 Marks
Visit the Australian Stock Exchange website, www.asx.com.au and from “Prices and research” drop-down menu, select “Company information”. Type in the ASX code “CCL” (Coca-Cola Amatil Limited), and find out details about the company. Your task will be to get the opening prices of a CCL share for every quarter from January 2001 to December 2015. If you are working with the monthly prices, read the values in the beginning of every Quarter (January, April, July, October) for every year from 2001 to 2015. It is part of the assignment task to test your ability to find the information from an appropriate website. If you are unable to do so, you may read the values from the chart provided below obtained from Etrade Australia. Obviously, reading from the chart will not be accurate and you may expect around 60 percent marks with such inaccuracy. After you have recorded the share prices, answer the following questions:
(a) List all the values in a table and then construct a stem-and-leaf display for the data. 1 mark
(b) Construct a relative frequency histogram for these data with equal class widths, the first class being “$4 to less than $6”. 1 mark
(c) Briefly describe what the histogram and the stem-and-leaf display tell you about the data. What effects would there be if the class width is doubled, which means the first class will be “$4 to less than $8”? 1 mark
What proportion of stock prices were above $10?
(Note: Use only the original values of share prices and not adjusted values.)
Question 2 4 Marks
The following table provides the median weekly rents of a 3-bedroom house of a few randomly selected suburbs in four capital cities of Australia – Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and Perth – for March 2016. The data is obtained from the website https://www.realestate.com.au/neighbourhoods/. From the data answer the questions below for the capital cities.
(a) Compute the mean, median, first quartile, and third quartile for each capital city (with only the data provided for that city, do not add/delete values for any new/given suburb of question 2) using the exact position, (n+1)f, where n is the number of observations and f the relevant fraction for the quartile. 1 mark
(b) Compute the standard deviation, range and coefficient of variation from the sample data for each city. 1 mark
(c) Draw a box and whisker plot for the median weekly rents of each city and put them side by side on the same scale so that the prices can be compared. 1mark
(d) Compare the box plots and comment on the distribution of the data. 1 mark
Question 3 4 Marks
The Table below is taken from the Australian Bureau of Statistics website. It provides data on energy use of households – almost all houses use mains electricity but some use additional energy sources such as gas and solar. (You can get the data from Table 1 from the URL: http://www.abs.gov.au/AUSSTATS/[email protected]/DetailsPage/4602.0.55.001Mar%202014?OpenDocument.) Missing cells indicate data not published, and totals may be higher since all possibilities may not be listed. The totals are not incorrect.).
Based on the information available in the table above –
(a) What is the probability that an Australian household, randomly selected, uses solar as a source of energy? 1 mark
(b) What is the probability that an Australian household, randomly selected, uses mains gas and is located in Victoria? 1 mark
(c) Given that a household uses LPG/bottled gas, what is the probability that the household is located in South Australia? 1 mark
(d) Is the percentage of Australian households using mains gas independent of the state? 1 mark
Question 4 4 Marks
(a) The following data collected from the Australian Bureau of Meteorology Website (http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/data/?ref=ftr) gives the daily rainfall data for the year 2015 in Brisbane. The zero values indicate no rainfall and the left-most column gives the date. Assuming that the weekly rainfall event (number of days in a week with rainfall) follows a Poisson distribution (There are 52 weeks in a year and a week is assumed to start from Monday. The first week starts from 29 December 2014 – you are expected to visit the website and get the daily values which are not given in the table below. Make sure you put the correct station number. Ignore the last few days of 2015 if it exceeds 52 weeks.):
(i) What is the probability that on any given week in a year there would be no rainfall? 1 mark
(ii) What is the probability that there will be 2 or more days of rainfall in a week? 1 mark
|
Poor quality red wine |
|||||||
|
alcohol |
residual sugar |
chlorides |
total sulfur dioxide |
density |
pH |
sulphates |
citric acid |
|
9 |
2.2 |
0.074 |
47 |
1.0008 |
3.25 |
0.57 |
0.66 |
|
8.4 |
2.1 |
0.2 |
16 |
0.9994 |
3.16 |
0.63 |
0.49 |
|
10.7 |
4.25 |
0.097 |
14 |
0.9966 |
3.63 |
0.54 |
0 |
|
9.9 |
1.5 |
0.145 |
48 |
0.99832 |
3.38 |
0.86 |
0.42 |
|
11 |
3.4 |
0.084 |
11 |
0.99892 |
3.48 |
0.49 |
0.02 |
|
10.9 |
2.1 |
0.137 |
9 |
0.99476 |
3.5 |
0.4 |
0 |
|
9.8 |
1.2 |
0.267 |
29 |
0.99471 |
3.32 |
0.51 |
0 |
|
10.2 |
5.7 |
0.082 |
14 |
0.99808 |
3.4 |
0.52 |
0.05 |
|
9.95 |
1.8 |
0.078 |
12 |
0.996 |
3.55 |
0.63 |
0.02 |
|
9 |
4.4 |
0.086 |
29 |
0.9974 |
3.38 |
0.5 |
0.08 |
|
9.8 |
1.5 |
0.172 |
19 |
0.994 |
3.5 |
0.48 |
0.09 |
|
9.3 |
2.8 |
0.088 |
46 |
0.9976 |
3.26 |
0.51 |
0.3 |
|
13.1 |
2.1 |
0.054 |
65 |
0.9934 |
3.9 |
0.56 |
0.15 |
|
9.2 |
2.1 |
0.084 |
43 |
0.9976 |
3.31 |
0.53 |
0.26 |
|
9.1 |
1.5 |
0.08 |
119 |
0.9972 |
3.16 |
1.12 |
0.2 |
|
10.5 |
1.4 |
0.045 |
85 |
0.9938 |
3.75 |
0.48 |
0.04 |
|
9.4 |
3.4 |
0.61 |
69 |
0.9996 |
2.74 |
2 |
1 |
|
9.2 |
1.3 |
0.072 |
20 |
0.9965 |
3.17 |
1.08 |
0.02 |
|
9 |
1.6 |
0.072 |
42 |
0.9956 |
3.37 |
0.48 |
0.03 |
|
9.1 |
1.8 |
0.058 |
8 |
0.9972 |
3.36 |
0.33 |
0.03 |
|
11.4 |
2.1 |
0.061 |
31 |
0.9948 |
3.51 |
0.43 |
0.06 |
|
10.4 |
2 |
0.089 |
55 |
0.99745 |
3.31 |
0.57 |
0.36 |
|
9.4 |
2 |
0.087 |
67 |
0.99565 |
3.35 |
0.6 |
0.04 |
|
9.8 |
3.3 |
0.096 |
61 |
1.00025 |
3.6 |
0.72 |
0 |
|
9.6 |
4.5 |
0.07 |
49 |
0.9981 |
3.05 |
0.57 |
0.49 |
|
9.6 |
2.1 |
0.07 |
47 |
0.9991 |
3.3 |
0.56 |
0.49 |
|
10 |
2.3 |
0.103 |
14 |
0.9978 |
3.34 |
0.52 |
0.24 |
|
10 |
2.1 |
0.088 |
23 |
0.9962 |
3.26 |
0.47 |
0.27 |
|
11.3 |
3.4 |
0.105 |
86 |
1.001 |
3.43 |
0.64 |
0.22 |
|
11 |
2.2 |
0.07 |
14 |
0.9967 |
3.32 |
0.58 |
0.01 |
|
11 |
4.4 |
0.096 |
13 |
0.997 |
3.41 |
0.57 |
0.02 |
|
9.6 |
2.6 |
0.073 |
84 |
0.9972 |
3.32 |
0.7 |
0.48 |
|
9.7 |
1.6 |
0.078 |
14 |
0.998 |
3.29 |
0.54 |
0.04 |
|
11.2 |
3.1 |
0.086 |
12 |
0.9958 |
3.54 |
0.6 |
0.1 |
|
11.4 |
2.1 |
0.102 |
7 |
0.99462 |
3.44 |
0.58 |
0.24 |
|
10.9 |
2.5 |
0.058 |
9 |
0.99632 |
3.38 |
0.55 |
0.07 |
|
9.9 |
1.6 |
0.147 |
51 |
0.99836 |
3.38 |
0.86 |
0.44 |
| Assessment Title | Continuous improvement |
| Task Description
Assignment Overview This assessment item requires you to consider:-
…you must then write a 2,000 word ESSAY describing and justifying a high-level approach to continuous improvement plan for an organisation from a selected case study. The case study will be supplied for a range of project domains:-
You are encouraged to use assignment outputs that you may have developed from previous assignments and courses, as examples in the appendix of your essay. Task Your task is to consider the domains above and write an ESSAY illustrating and explaining continuous improvement plan for one case study. Your plan must explain and justify itself within the context of the case study using the course and peer reviewed material. You are encouraged to review Kerzner Chapter 21 and the PMI Managing Change in Organizations for an indication of the context and content of your plan. You will be graded upon how well your continuous improvement plan has been completed and how well you argue that it reflects the requirements of the organisation in the case study that you select. Purpose The primary purpose of this assessment item is to help you to develop skills in the contents and compilation of a continuous improvement plan for a project management methodology. The secondary purpose of this assignment is to give you the opportunity to consider the role of a continuous improvement plan within the strategic project management plans of a selected organisation. The assignment will also give you the opportunity to enhance your analysis and written communication skills; particularly in the areas of structured assignment writing. Structure Your submission should be made using Microsoft Office documents and the essay submitted as a separate 2,000 word Microsoft WORD document. You should describe all of the required parts of your continuous improvement plan in as complete manner as you deem appropriate. A range of sample continuous improvement plan will be identified for you to study during the course. If you wish to include examples of any parts you may do so in an appendix. You must not include pictures or diagrams in the body of the essay. You must provide an ILLUSTRATION OR DRAWING OF YOUR CONTINUOUS IMPROVEMENT PLAN in the appendix of your essay. Your essay should be a properly constructed academic essay. It should contain an effective introduction, body and conclusion. The introduction should introduce the essay and include your argument. The body should present the evidence you have collected to support your argument, and the conclusion should restate your argument, summarise the evidence and make a conclusion regarding your argument. The essay should contain a coherent, but necessarily restricted review of the academic literature on the project management topics in question. The literature review should be integrated into the essay, not a separate section. Do not include an executive summary or an abstract. A reference list formatted in the prescribed Harvard style is compulsory. Do not include a bibliography. This assessment item involves researching your assigned topic to enhance your understanding of project management concepts and utilisation of academic literature. Whilst you use the recommended textbooks you may also refer to relevant peer reviewed, academic journal articles. You will be expected to present information and evidence from, and cite, at least twenty (20) times the course resources but you can use other PEER REVIEWED sources where you can argue that they add greater relevance. |
|
| Assessment Due Date | Week 12 Friday (03-Jun-2016) 05:00 PM AEST |
| Return Date to Students | Exam Week Friday (17-Jun-2016) |
| Weighting | 25% |
| Assessment Criteria
Your assignment will be assessed on the extent and quality to which it meets each of the following criteria.
|
|
| Referencing Style | Harvard (author-date) |
| Submission | Online
To be submitted as Microsoft Word document files. |
| Learning Outcomes Assessed | This section can be expanded to view the assessed learning outcomes |
| Graduate Attributes | This section can be expanded to view the assessed graduate attributes |
4 Practical Assessment
| Assessment Title | Presentation with accompanying script |
| Task Description
Assignment Overview This assessment item requires you to consider:-
…you must then undertake a presentation and submit a written script that explains and justifies project management methodologies for the following range of project domains:-
You must submit a Microsoft PowerPoint presentation and then make a presentation to your peers that discusses and explains your insights to the above (flex student will answer questions over the telephone). You must also submit a written set of presentation notes or script that matches your presentation. The notes can be either part of your PowerPoint presentation or written and submitted separately in Microsoft Word. You are encouraged to use assignment output and ideas that you may have developed from previous courses as supporting evidence for your presentation. Task Your task is to consider the three learning outcomes listed below in the context of this course. You must then make a presentation of 15 minutes length that summarises the learning outcomes below and how they relate to the spectrum of the major project domains discussed during the course (flex students will answer questions over the telephone). Once your 15 minute presentation has been made you must be prepared to answer questions for 10 minutes from course participants. You will be graded based on how well you have made your presentation and described, discussed, explained and critically analysed the project management theories and principles according to these assignment instructions. Purpose The primary purpose of this assessment item is to help you to develop and demonstrate your skills in the use of project management concepts, principles, theories and arguments about the application of organisational project management methodologies. You are particularly required to demonstrate your ability to differentiate methodological aspects as they relate to different projects and different project domains. The secondary purpose of this assignment is to give you the opportunity to enhance your analysis, critical thinking and written communication skills; particularly in the areas of argument development and oral presentation. Structure Your presentation should be a properly constructed academic presentation. It should contain an effective introduction, body, and conclusion. The introduction should introduce the presentation and include your major arguments. The body should present the evidence you have collected to support your arguments, and the conclusion should restate your arguments, summarise the evidence and make a conclusion regarding your arguments. The presentation should contain a coherent, but necessarily restricted review of the academic literature on the project management topics in question. Your literature review should be integrated into the presentation, not a separate section. Do not include an executive summary or an abstract. A reference list formatted in the prescribed Harvard style is compulsory. Do not include a bibliography. This assessment item involves researching your assigned topic to enhance your understanding of project management concepts and utilisation of academic literature. Whilst you should use the recommended textbooks you may also refer to relevant peer reviewed, academic journal articles. You will be expected to present information and evidence from, and cite, at least twenty (20) times from the peer reviewed material used the course. You are also encouraged to cite other material that is peer reviewed. |
|
| Assessment Due Date | Exam Week Monday (13-Jun-2016) 05:00 PM AEST
Presentation will be arranged during the course |
| Return Date to Students | Exam Week Friday (17-Jun-2016) |
| Weighting | 20% |
| Assessment Criteria
Your assignment will be assessed on the extent and quality to which it meets each of the following criteria.
|
|
| Referencing Style | Harvard (author-date) |
| Submission | Online
To be submitted as a PowerPoint document file and optionally a Microsoft Word document file |
| Learning Outcomes Assessed | This section can be expanded to view the assessed learning outcomes |
| Graduate Attributes | This section can be expanded to view the assessed graduate attribute |
Portfolio
| Assessment Title | Consolidated Portfolio |
| Task Description
Assignment Overview In this course you are required to complete a weekly portfolio. A portfolio provides evidence of previous and current experience and presents a dynamic record of your growth and professional learning over the duration of this course. Your portfolio will provide an account of your learning based on your practise and your critical reflection. Task Your task is to write a weekly portfolio reflecting upon your learnings from the prior week. In your portfolio you will identify:
Purpose The primary purpose of this assessment item is to help you to develop skills for undertaking research and translating, via your technical and creative skills, underpinning concepts about project management methodologies. The secondary purpose of this assignment is to give you the opportunity to enhance your analysis, critical thinking and written communication skills; particularly in the areas of thinking about and reflecting on different project domains and project management methodologies. Developing a portfolio, as a result, makes your learning more explicit as you translate your workplace and personal experiences into documented evidence. You can then learn to critically examine the nature of your learning on this course in relation to specific experiences in your project management practice and demonstrate that you have learned from those experiences and how you have achieved or maintained your professional competence as a result. The assignment will also give you the opportunity to enhance your analysis and written communication skills; particularly in the areas of rigorous structured assignment writing. Structure You will be provided on the Moodle web site with a portfolio template. You should use this template and upload a weekly portfolio to the Moodle web site. At the end of this course you will consolidate your portfolio into a single document and upload an overall consolidated portfolio submission. Your portfolio should contain a coherent, but necessarily restricted review of the academic literature related to the project management topics for each week. You should also include a weekly reference list formatted in the prescribed Harvard style. You are also encouraged to include a bibliography. This assessment item involves researching the topics to enhance your understanding of each concept through an utilisation of academic literature and secondary sources. Whilst you must use the recommended textbooks and web links, you should also refer to other sources on the Moodle web site and additional relevant peer reviewed academic journal articles of your choosing. Weekly Portfolio Your weekly portfolio can be as long or as short as you want it to be. It is your portfolio and shows your development of understanding during the course. Naturally, this will make the portfolio different for everyone. Each student’s background, education, current and past work experiences is what makes it different. Each student’s personal researches will be different. What you need to do is to give yourself enough time to reflect and show how you have thought and come to grips with the ideas that address the learning outcomes of the course. The amount of time you should be allocating to the course is 12 to 16 hours per week (which includes writing the portfolio). So there should be a fair bit of time for you to make the reflections and reach a depth of insight that will make the portfolio meaningful. With each weeks portfolio that you submit you do not include the writing that you made for a prior week. Instead you use the same portfolio template using only the section for the week you are writing about. In other words each week’s portfolio is a reflection upon that week. You should however, revisit the whole of the course learning outcomes each week. The portfolio for any previous week is a reflection of your insights and thoughts for that week. Once you upload the portfolio then leave it for that week. Over the duration of the course you will find that there is a development and change of your ideas as you study the material. You will then have opportunity at the end of the course to consolidate everything and show how you have gained the insights that the course is seeking to provide. At the end of the course you should review your weekly portfolios and consolidate them into a single submission. You should make a personal reflection in this submission. This is the assessment that gets marked. It is to your benefit to have the personal discipline to make sure that you do not get behind. If you are allocating 12 or 16 hours per week for the course then there is plenty of time for the portfolio. If you find that one week you slip then ok, but the course is fundamentally planned so that you need to allocate 12 to 16 hours each week. Two hours lost in one week means that you need to do 14 to 18 hours the next! The course is straight forward, but there are lots of web sites to visit and material to download. The text books are only part of the story and you won’t be able to do the course with just the text books. Unfortunately, much of the material is written from a North American perspective. You will need to consider other industry sectors and also to be able to translate the learning outcomes into an Australian or other cultural perspective. Therefore, you will need to download other files and visit web sites to be able to gather the material you need in your portfolio. There are no bonus points for getting the portfolio perfect from the first week! In fact the portfolio for the first week is much more likely to be an amateurish attempt. It is unlikely that you’ll really know what you’re doing in the first and second week, and if you pretended you do then it would be hard to believe you anyway! Understanding and familiarity will only develop over time. As you do the portfolios’ each week and keep revisiting the learning outcomes and adding the course material then you will gain insights required. Unless you do that on a weekly basis you won’t have the appropriate perspective to make the journey and reach the destination by the end of the course. Consolidated Portfolio You will be provided with a template for the consolidated portfolio due at the end of the course. Since you’ll have made your own journey studying during the course then the material that you will want to include in this portfolio will be unique for you. Your final portfolio will explain how you have developed your understanding of the learning outcomes and the topics with each week’s study. There are a number of ways you can provide a consolidated portfolio. It is up to you to decide which way work the best for you. You final portfolio MUST be made as a single submission. For example:-
You must NOT use an index and numbering system to identify material from prior week’s leaving each portfolio on the course web site. Whatever way that you do it; the final portfolio is the important one! It’s important that you make it clear to the marker what your consolidated portfolio refers to otherwise you may not get the marks you expect. An analogy for the final portfolio is that you can imagine that you are going before an examination board at the end of the course and presenting to them a complete portfolio of your journey through the course. You will hand each board member a package that they should then be able to read and from it appreciate everything that you have done and learned during your work life and the course. Referencing Ensuring you have accurate references is important and will allow the marker to easily identify where your portfolio maps to the course or other peer reviewed material. Also you need to show how you have made critical reflection on the material and added your own unique insights. Referencing should be made according to CQU’s Harvard referencing guide. To locate the guide then Google “CQU Harvard referencing” and download the PDF file for the current year. It is as a consequence of your references and academic proficiency with critical analysis that you will be able to gain MAXIMUM MARKS. |
|
| Assessment Due Date | Portfolio’s must be submitted weekly with a final consolidated portfolio submitted in the review/exam week. |
| Return Date to Students | Feedback on each weekly portfolio will be provided in the week following submission. |
| Weighting | 30% |
| Assessment Criteria
Your assignment will be assessed on the extent and quality to which it meets each of the following criteria.
|
|
| Referencing Style | Harvard (author-date) |
| Submission | Online
To be submitted as weekly Microsoft WORD document files then a final consolidated Microsoft WORD or ZIP file in the review/exam week. |
| Learning Outcomes Assessed | This section can be expanded to view the assessed learning outcomes |
| Graduate Attributes | This section can be expanded to view the assessed graduate attributes |
Statistics for managerial decision
Name of the Student
Name of the University
Author Note
Q1 answer:
Here, the researcher has downloaded quarterly historical price of Coca Cola over the period January 2001 to December 2015, here the entire data price has been rounding off to one decimal place.
[a] Stem and leaf plot
Based on the data below is the stem and leaf plot drawn.
[b] Relative frequency histogram
The above-mentioned histogram as well as stem and leaf plot indicates that the historical price of Coca Cola over this period is positively skewed. In this context, if instead of the width of the first class being “$4 to less than $6”, “$4 to less than $8” has been taken into account as class width, then the distribution of historical price will follow a bimodal distribution.
[d] Proportion of stock prices were above $10
It has seen from the data set that there are 60 data over this specific period. However, number of data above $10 is 6. So the proportion is 6 / 60 = 10%
Q2 answer:
[a] Mean, median, first quartile, and third quartile
[b] Standard deviation, range and coefficient of variation
[c] Box and whisker plot for the median weekly rents
[d] Comparison of the box plots
From the above box plots, it can be said that Melbourne city has the maximum deviation in weekly rent.
Answer to question 3:
[a] Probability of use of solar by an Australian household = Number of Australian household who uses solar / Total households
= 996 / 5612.6
= 0.177458
= 17.746%
[b] Probability of use of mains gas and is located in Victoria = Number of Victorian household, who mains gas / Total households
= 1466.7/ 5612.6
= 0.261323
= 26.1323%
[c] Probability = Probability that a south Australian household uses LPG / bottled gas / Probability that a household uses LPG/bottled gas
= (68.5/5612.6) / (781.5/5612.6)
= 0.087652
= 8.765%
[d] It can be said that the probability that an Australian household uses mains gas = 3559.1/5612.6
= 0.634126786
= 63.413%
On the state wise probability of use of mains gas can be calculated as follow:
NSW = 871.2/1708.2 = 0.510010537
Vic = 1466.7/1607.9 = 0.912183594
Qld = 153/781.7 = 0.195727261
SA =357.1/498.3 = 0.716636564
WA = 601.3/728.0 = 0.825961538
Therefore, NSW * Vic * Qld * SA * WA = 0.053897859
So, it is state wise dependent.
Answer to question 4:
- A data set collected from the website of the Australian Bureau of Meteorology has been provided. The data set provides the value of the daily rainfall for the year 2015 in Brisbane. The following probabilities need to be calculated on the basis of this data.
- Let X denotes the number of days in a week experiencing rainfall. It is given that the distribution of X is Poisson with mean β. The mean of the distribution is collected from the data provided.
Mean rainfall of the year 2015 calculated over all the 52 weeks in the year is given by
β = 27.796.
We have to calculate the probability that on any given week in the year there would be no rainfall. It is given by
Probability = 1-∑P(X=x_i) where i=1 to 52
P(X=x) = (exp (-β)*β^(x))/x!
The required probability of not raining on any given week in the year is 0.0001.
- The next probability, which we are required to calculate, is the probability that there will be two or more days of rainfall in a week.
Hence we need to calculate the following probability
P (X≥2) =1-(P(X=1) + P(X=2)) = 1
- In this part of the question, it is denoted that the weekly total amount of rainfall follows Normal distribution. Let Y be the variable denoting the total amount of rainfall in each week. Hence, Y follows Normal distribution with mean µ and standard deviation ∑. Now, the value of this mean and standard deviation needs to be calculated. The mean µ = 27.796 and the standard deviation ∑ = 108.542.
- Here it is required to calculate the probability that the amount of rainfall per week is between 5mm and 10mm.the required probability is given by
P (5≤Y≤!0) = F(10) – F(5) = 0.018.
Q 5 answer:
[a] Normality plot
- The 95% confidence interval for the mean of each of the variables of good wine is given as follows:
Alcohol = 10.985- 11.484
Residual sugar = 2.63-3.27
Chlorides = 0.074-0.092
Total sulphur dioxide =29.71- 40.05
Density = 0.9972 – 0.9982
Ph = 3.214-3.284
Sulphates = 0.784-0.806
Citric acid = 0.398-0.507
- The mean for the different variables of medium and poor quality red wine is as follows;
Medium quality poor quality
Alcohol 9.68 10.07
Residual sugar 2.51 2.48
Chlorides 0.105 0.109
Total sulphur dioxide 59.82 37.35
Density 0.996 0.997
Ph 3.321 3.372
Sulphates 0.691 0.629
Citric acid 0.238 0.2008
- It is observed that only the means of the variable density of both medium and poor quality wine and the mean value of the variable total sulphur dioxide of poor quality wine lies within the confidence interval of mean calculated for the good quality wine. As those attributes of the wine which does not lie within the confidence interval plays a significant role in determining the quality of the wine, hence the above calculations show that other than density and total sulphur dioxide all other attributes are significant in determining the quality of wine.
Waterfall Methodology in Crowd Sourcing Software Development
Name of the Student
Name of the University
1. Introduction:
The study includes the demonstration of the process that indicates developing software applications in crowd sourcing. The organization like TopCoder includes the project management methodology such as Waterfall model for carrying out the development of the software application development properly. The crowd sourcing platform provides the opportunity to the clients to contact the developer or group of developers. Some of the organization let the clients contact the developer directly (Good and Su 2013). On the other hand, some organizations, it acts as a medium between the client and developer. In some software development, the organizations also include the concept of the scrum so that the development can handle the new requirements regarding the application to be developed. Like the TopCoder AMT or Amazon Mechanical Turk is another crowd outsourcing platform. In contrast of TopCoder, AMT focuses on the human intelligence or micro tasks (Poetz and Schreier 2012).
The waterfall project management methodology as the processes in the project are aligned in the sequential manner. The life cycle model is also known as the linear-sequential life cycle model (Kounina et al. 2013). The model is the best for dividing the tasks into subtasks and later combining the subtasks’ solution for creating a complete software solution.
3. Software Development in Crowed Sourcing With Waterfall Mode:
The adoption of the crowd sourcing can be seen in several industries like T-shirt sales, designing and software development. The study mainly focused on the development of the software through the crowd sourcing platform. Crowd sourcing provide various advantages to the organizations and customers. The benefits are. First, it allows the customer to get a solution at very low cost and the organizations also can see construction in terms of processes. It is because the organizations do not need hire developers directly rather it lets the clients pay the fees to the developers and take a certain amount of capital from the client (Poetz and Schreier 2012). Crowd sourcing also provides faster time to market across the globe. Through the participation of board, it can be a great platform for providing high quality product. Open innovations can also be seen because of the crowd sourcing. The basic entities that the crowd sourcing is comprised of are nature of the task, the locus of governing and workforces’ nature. Nature of work refers to the activities regarding the development of the software. The development can be a complex task to complete because of the interdepend queries. Locus of control is the process of governing the activities of software development that the customer organizations carries out (Good and Su 2013). Finally, the workforces’ nature reflects the typically undefined large group of external people who individually completes the tasks and provide the distinct solutions to the organization.
. The Brook’s law characterizes the prerequisite of the correspondence among the different engineers. The errands are done in parallel and autonomously by the mindful engineers. There stay some vulnerability with respect to the auspicious conveyance of the item. Thus, arranging and planning turn into a crucial concern in regards to the improvement (Satzger et al. 2013). On the off chance that the item is conveyed on time however not with a decent quality, then the reaction from the client association won’t be palatable. Keeping the importance on that appropriate conveyance and quality both are vital in respects to a product progression.
There exists some important apprehensions that must be measured while generating applications on a crowed sourcing platform. The outsourcing situations more often than not confront it. In correlation with the free and little procedure of the AMT, the product improvement undertakings are related and complex. The distribution of the services is amongst the basic issues that are generated regarding the development of applications in the crowd sourcing platform (Stol and Fitzgerald (2014). Disintegrating the advancement product work into littler assignments is the way to the achievement with respect to a group sourced improvement. The mindful individual must give a superb depiction of the undertaking while breaking down the advancement product work. Building up an appropriate correspondence and coordination are another issues that can hurt the improvement assignment (Agerfalk, Fitzgerald and Stol 2015). The coordination and correspondence are fundamental to the improvement work on the grounds that to accomplish the goal the individual undertakings must be lined. Coordination furthermore typifies the accomplishment with respect to the interdependent natures. It is crucial that the people who represent the inaccessible platforms have to be a fragment of the crowd sourcing organization (Bayus 2013).
TechPlatform Inc. is an overall stage which gives administrations and arrangements through the cloud. The quantity of the representatives of TechPaltfrm is several thousand. The association likewise includes four-hundred deals workplaces, and it has accomplices in around seventy-five nations (Huhns, Li and Tsai 2013).
TopCoder alludes to the stage through which TPI is group sourcing its product advancement. Inspecting crowd souring regarding a software development activities are the key goal of the study. On the basis of the customer view point the examination will be carried out. For identifying and determining the activities and challenges, it will offer a better view (Bayus 2013). The activities and the challenges are concentrated on the implementation of a software. For gathering the relevant and vital data, face-to-face and semi-structured interactions with the key informants have been conducted. In the activities of developing the software in the crowd sourcing the informants were stakeholders (Li et al. 2013).
In between 2004 to 2014, the TopCoder has established the employee base from fifty-thousand to six lakhs and twelve, a huge number of staffs. The rundown of blue chips associations is the client of TopCoder. Programming improvement, investigation and front-end development calculations are the entities that the TopCoder provides (Satzger et l. 2013). By means of a succession of rivalries, TopCoder performs the errand of the product advancement. Selecting the co-pilot is the responsibility of the manager of TopCoder. The project leader’s one of the most significant task is checking the consumers projects. The co-pilots must have poorer experience as a TpCoder developer so that it can efficiently handle the individual responsible tasks. Creating competiveness have to be created by the co-pilot for successfully carry out the development activities (Tung and Tseng 2013). The pecking order of the aggressive sports is, for example, co-pilot determination, plan, UI improvement, advancement, quality affirmation, and support. The user interface improvement and advancement occur in parallel. Then again, the quality certification and upkeep are done all the while (Zogaj, Bretschneider and Leimeister 2014).
Back-end, front-end and various tests are the various tasks that the TopCoder and TPI is responsible for carrying out to deliver a complete solution. The information was gathered from the accumulated information. Arranging, scripting, reporting, importing and demonstrating are the various aspects of the font end. In terms of TPI the choice over selecting the components regarding group sourcing is a vital consideration. The components must have to be accurate in term soft the group sourcing (Saxton, Oh and Kishore 2013). If the responsible person directly combines the codes which were collected from the different developers then it can be a huge issue. In terms of the TopCoder perspective, the exercises which are identified with the product advancement includes an amount of interrelated stages (Poetz and Schreier 2012).
It additionally holds the opposition at every stage and the normal time of rivalry according to the distinct phases. The figure 3 in the Stol and Fitzgerald (2014) provide information in regards to the arranging of all the stages. It likewise speaks to the conditions among the few challenges. Another main issues in the development of the software is managing time. The time division of the tasks are the prime entity that generates most of the time related issues (Mao et al. 2013). The time related issues was not only concern about the employees, it is also a headache of the clients. Taken as an example, the clients get an average of five days to reject and accept the deliverables. Frequently it produced some issues various problems the client’s end at the given time was insufficient for the customer to look at and test the deliverables (Kounina et al. 2013). Another issue with respect to the deliverables that it must be acknowledged or dismisses in general. TPI frequently acknowledges the abandoned codes from the engineers as they intended to dishearten TopCoder designers from offering later on rivalries. Another issue with respect to the arranging and timetable happened when TPI needed to postpone the item conveyance for completing substance; it doesn’t make a difference if the fundamental parts of the product are as yet developing. It made numerous issues with respect to the combination (Good and Su 2013).
The TopCoder exercises are normally a waterfall. Despite the fact that it additionally joins the scrum venture advancement technique. Building up the best possible association between the two task administration strategies is a noteworthy issue (Garrigues et al. 2013). TPI include strategic scrum group which is doled out to different employments for more adaptability, however, the not to the long-haul ventures. For the long haul and crucial ventures, the association dependably go for the waterfall project management methodology. The iterative project management methodology gets included in the projects that offer support to the incorporation of various changes during the development (Corominas et al. 2013). The Titan project was comprising of more than fifty TC competitions. The complete improvement of the Titan task was made in thirteen days. Each of the stages took eighty days on a normal. The low-end legacy and outsider clusters were the briefest improvement which took sixty-nine days. What’s more with that, front-end HTML boards at the primary stage were the longest advancement viewpoint which took ninety days (Huhns, Li and Tsai 2013).
Regarding the key problems of time, cost and quality, a certain result of the comparison between crewed sourcing and in-house software development does not exist. The clients pay estimated cost directly to TopCoder. The amount of the price is hundred thousand US dollars. At the time of quantity of tasks to be done by the developers of the TopCoder embodied a crucial aspect of the complete development (Stol and Fitzgerald 2014). The user interface panel’s complexity was very simple as it for handling it no in-depth business domain knowledge was required. An important aspect of the development was the incorporation of waterfall project management methodology. The areas that worked well in terms of TPI are a graphical user interface or GUI design, storyboards and icon design.
3. Conclusion:
From the above study it can be concluded that the incorporation of the waterfall project management methodology will be responsible for creating a project that will provide profit to the organization. The Proper period can be given to the designers by the association as the lifecycle model separates the advancement stages. Despite the examined points of interest, the life cycle display additionally accompanies some undesirable downsides, for example, no fractional arrangement can be built until the consummation of the advancement. Besides, a high measure of dangers and instability stays in the task in light of the use of the waterfall model. Through the crowd sourcing platforms the clients get an opportunity of having the software with a cooperative low cost than the other organization. Often it gets difficult for the organization to break down the task and to combine the solution later. The software of the crowd sourcing often comprises of various flaws. The waterfall lifecycle model provides the opportunity for subdiving the errand and control over the little assignments. The model partitions the complete venture into six phases. TPI give deliverables to the customers before starting the undertaking. It would have been simpler in the event that a few parts of the deliverables could be acknowledged or dismisses. With respect to programming advancement, swarm sourcing programming improvement is a developing and particular action. An obscure grouping and scaled outsider get included in the group sourcing as opposed to ordinary outsourcing procedures.
References:
Agerfalk, P.J., Fitzgerald, B. and Stol, K.J., 2015. Not so shore anymore: the new imperatives when sourcing in the age of open. InProceedings of the 23rd European Conference on Information Systems.
Bayus, B.L., 2013. Crowdsourcing new product ideas over time: An analysis of the Dell IdeaStorm community. Management Science, 59(1), pp.226-244.
Corominas, L., Foley, J., Guest, J.S., Hospido, A., Larsen, H.F., Morera, S. and Shaw, A., 2013. Life cycle assessment applied to wastewater treatment: state of the art. Water research, 47(15), pp.5480-5492.
Garrigues, E., Corson, M.S., Angers, D.A., van der Werf, H.M. and Walter, C., 2013. Development of a soil compaction indicator in life cycle assessment. The International Journal of Life Cycle Assessment, 18(7), pp.1316-1324.
Good, B.M. and Su, A.I., 2013. Crowdsourcing for bioinformatics.Bioinformatics, p.btt333.
Huhns, M.N., Li, W. and Tsai, W.T., 2013. Cloud-based software crowdsourcing (dagstuhl seminar 13362). Dagstuhl Reports, 3(9).
Kounina, A., Margni, M., Bayart, J.B., Boulay, A.M., Berger, M., Bulle, C., Frischknecht, R., Koehler, A., i Canals, L.M., Motoshita, M. and Nunez, M., 2013. Review of methods addressing freshwater use in life cycle inventory and impact assessment. The International Journal of Life Cycle Assessment, 18(3), pp.707-721.
Li, K., Xiao, J., Wang, Y. and Wang, Q., 2013, July. Analysis of the key factors for software quality in crowdsourcing development: An empirical study on topcoder. com. In Computer Software and Applications Conference (COMPSAC), 2013 IEEE 37th Annual (pp. 812-817). IEEE.
Mao, K., Yang, Y., Li, M. and Harman, M., 2013. Pricing crowdsourcing-based software development tasks. In Proceedings of the 2013 international conference on Software engineering (pp. 1205-1208). IEEE Press.
Poetz, M.K. and Schreier, M., 2012. The value of crowdsourcing: can users really compete with professionals in generating new product ideas?. Journal of Product Innovation Management, 29(2), pp.245-256.
Satzger, B., Psaier, H., Schall, D. and Dustdar, S., 2013. Auction-based crowdsourcing supporting skill management. Information Systems, 38(4), pp.547-560.
Saxton, G.D., Oh, O. and Kishore, R., 2013. Rules of crowdsourcing: Models, issues, and systems of control. Information Systems Management,30(1), pp.2-20.
Stol, K.J. and Fitzgerald, B., 2014. Two’s company, three’s a crowd: a case study of crowdsourcing software development. In Proceedings of the 36th International Conference on Software Engineering (pp. 187-198). ACM.
Tung, Y.H. and Tseng, S.S., 2013. A novel approach to collaborative testing in a crowdsourcing environment. Journal of Systems and Software, 86(8), pp.2143-2153.
Zhou, D., Liu, Q., Platt, J.C., Meek, C. and Shah, N.B., 2015. Regularized minimax conditional entropy for crowdsourcing. arXiv preprint arXiv:1503.07240.
Zogaj, S., Bretschneider, U. and Leimeister, J.M., 2014. Managing crowdsourced software testing: a case study based insight on the challenges of a crowdsourcing intermediary. Journal of Business Economics, 84(3), pp.375-405.
