The Seneca Park Zoo Society collects business metrics for various categories such as donations, memberships, and merchandise. The data is spread out across platforms such as Blackbaud’s Altru, Financial Edge, Facebook analytics, Google Analytics, and Microsoft Excel, which can be challenging to access all at once. This means there is no off the shelf solution to display all metrics collected from those sources. A centralized platform will allow them to better optimize their resources and help them better accomplish their missions and goals. The Seneca Park Zoo Society Business Intelligence Dashboard is a platform that displays metrics on business performance across different categories such as volunteer programs, special events, merchandise, etc. By using those metrics, alarm triggers can be initiated to provide an early warning for potentially struggling programs. These alerts could range from texts and emails to color changes on the display. Leaders will be able to view the department they are responsible for and view the negative or positive impacts of their decisions. This helps leadership understand the status of the business, make decisions on the budget, and identify gaps in the business flow without needing a technical background. This will allow the Seneca Park Zoo Society to improve their financial performance, conservation mission, and understanding of the people they serve.
For our project we are going to follow a Scrum approach with our own modifications to better fit our project. Our reason for using Scrum is that we will have an active product sponsor who we will be meeting with every week for feedback and show deliverables to. We do have a broad overview of features, but we will need to be constantly meeting to get into more detail. Because of this, we will want to take a more iterative approach to this project. We will have a backlog of tasks which will have points assigned to them with the level of effort. This level of effort will be determined using the T-shirt sizing method. Sprints will be two weeks long and at the end of each sprint there will be a demo shown to the project sponsor and the project will be deployed to the sponsor. We will also have a burndown chart as a metric of project tracking and progress. Our initial sprints will heavily focus on exploring the data and what different options we can take. After that we will focus more on the implementation of features. Our project will be stored in a private GitHub repository. This needs to be private because it is not an open source project and is meant to only be viewed by employees of the zoo. The team will utilize feature branches when implementing new features. A pull request reviewed by team members is required when merging new features into the main branch. Testing will be done in two ways, at the code level and requirements level. Our plan is to develop the code first and then write unit tests after that to make sure the code is sound. Test-driven development does not work in our case because we won’t truly know the details of the features we will be developing ahead of time. Once we have written and tested our features, we will test our features’ design with the project sponsor. This will involve usability tests and meeting with the sponsor to check that the feature meets their expectations.
• Tyler Kiesman
• Daniel Gude
• Alan Xiao
• Ruth Northrop
• Beth LaPierre