1.1 Introduction
Anyone involved with duty allocation understands what a complex and time-consuming process this is. Strategic management is only successful when employees have the right tools to perform effectively. To accomplish this, a company institution or organization needs staff allocation solutions that enable employees to balance different duties. Coupled with efficient duty allocation, workflow runs smoothly from one task to the next. It is essential in today's dynamic global work environment that a company or organization secures a way to keep employees on task. Establishing a comprehensive strategic plan helps managers and supervisors allocate employees correctly.
The end result is fewer mistakes that only lead to expensive delays and cost overruns. Challenges to managing human resources are magnified for the company that still uses an old-fashioned paper-based system. Besides confusion, manual processes are simply lost in the computerized world. Duty allocation involves taking all existing tasks and dividing them among all available workers, so that each of them had the same work load. The chapter encapsulates the background, objectives, significance e.t.c of this project.
1.2 Background of the Study
This project tagged “Design and implementation of an automated duty allocation system, a case study of Federal Polytechnic, Nekede, security unit”, is centered on automating the hitherto manual process of involved in allocating duties to security personnel of our prestigious institution. The project was necessitated by the need of providing a platform that would make their work easier.
A duty allocation system in project management and systems engineering, is a deliverable-oriented breakdown of a project into smaller components. It is a type of work breakdown system. A work breakdown structure is a key project deliverable that organizes the team's work into manageable sections. In a present-day duty's allocation system, the management of the security department allocates duties to different units or departments based on time, cost, and resource availability. Often the projects are broken down into tasks and assigned to the team members based on their expertise using a manual billboard or paper ledger which comes with problems of:
- Unauthorized access
- Loss of records.
This project is primarily focused on automating the process of duty allocation system to suit the needs of the security department of the Imo State Polytechnic. Here the project manager is the chief security officer. The workers would for convenience be classed as the senior or junior security officers.
1.2 Statement of the Problem
The problems which exist on the previous system are:
- The security personnel cannot access details of allocated task globally.
- The manual processes are error prone and make data querying difficult.
- The manual process maks data privacy difficult to maintain thus making easy for unauthorized personnel to access.
- This is in danger of being lost or compromised as the medium of storage which usually a book can easily be damaged by anthropological activities such as fire etc.
1.3 Aim and Objectives of the Study
The aim of this project is to design and implementation of an automated duties allocation using the Security Unit of Imo state Polytechnic, Umuagwo as a case study. For this to be achieved we need to satisfy the following objectives.
- Design a system for dynamically allocating personnel duties.
- Implement a system managing and retrieving allocated duties. The manager can allocate tasks and mark tasks as done or undone, while a member of staff can view his allocated tasks.
- Creating an online system where security personnel can access details of allocated task globally.
- Using a relational database to make the process less error prone and easy to query.
- Data privacy is maintained by allowing only unauthorized personnel access to the system.
- The electronic medium of data storage has the advantage of preserving data for very long time.
1.5 Scope of the Study
The scope of this study is simply to design and implement a duties allocation system using the school security department as a case study.
1.6 Limitation of the Study
The following are limitations of the study are:
- Time: combining other school activities with project that of project writing is not an easy task and hence, limited this study as we couldn’t broaden the scope of the study as may be needed.
- Internet Access: Due to low quality of Internet access, this also affected the speed at which this research work was carried out.
- Finance: Money was another major problem we had during this study. This includes money gathering relevant materials and internet data subscriptions.
1.7 Significance of the Study
This project besides providing an automated means of records keeping would achieve the following:
- It would the problems processes involved in the manual system by; Using an online system to make the information globally accessible, Using a relational database to solve the problems of data integrity, Make their data safer and It resolves the problem of conflict of duties witnessed in a manual system.
- This work can be extended to other units or departments in our prestigious institution especially those that involve duties allocation.
- This research work will serve as a milestone for future research by students in the computer science who is interested in researching this field further.
1.8 Definition of Terms
Client:
A desktop computer or workstation that is capable of obtaining information and applications from a server.
Website:
A set of related web pages located under a single domain name.
Database Management System:
A system for organizing and managing a large amount of data.
Automation:
The use of machines to do work that was previously done by people.
Real Time:
Relating to a system in which input data is processed within milliseconds so that it is available virtually immediately as feedback to the process which it is coming, e.g. in a missile guidance system.
