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Business - Business Cases

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Business Cases

I developed a business case standard to take products and services through a five stage process.

I began work on a standard for business cases in April 2003 and started work on some structured business cases in December 2004. I spent perhaps 20% of my time on them after this date.

As with most small to medium size businesses, it is rare to find a business case and rarer to find one that follows any set methodology. The Business Case Standard, is part of the quality system, and provides the structure and guidelines to write a comprehensive business case. I felt that for the business to grow business cases would be necessary and they also answered the question internally "Why are we doing this?" I began work on a number of business cases but NAL has reverted to the less formal approach since my departure.

The business case documents are owned by NAL and can be shown to certain organisations only but here is a taster of the introductions.

Presentation Device Product Range Business Case

Currently NAL are not the first port of call when looking for new passenger information systems, in any market area. Some of what we do are new projects and some of what we do are projects based on end of year spend money. This development program is indented provide a set of presentation devices, both visual and audio, that will exploit the capabilities of the Tyrell3 system and make NAL one of the first choices in passenger information systems.

Many prestige transport projects exist throughout the world, including on our own railway and underground system and Nexus Alpha should be a natural part of any such system. To play a part in such a system we need the Tyrell3 system to meet its requirements and we need a range of presentation devices that would be suitable for integration into such prestige projects.

We must look at;

Presentation Device Product Software Business Case

Currently NAL has new and unreliable display software running on a PC. Although this code has been patched this has not provided us with the confidence we need. Also this code needs to run on a fairly hefty platform.

Advice (an audio announcing product) needs to be linked to the Tyrell3 system but there is significant work either at the Tyrell3 system end or the Advice end in order to make the data transfer in a way that supports the data handling concepts of the Tyrell3 system transport database.

We need the Tyrell3 system driving thin platform display devices and LED displays with audio, and we need the Advice product Tyrell3 driven. These presentation devices will not support local transport databases, which have proved fatter than expected but could contain small tables of the limited data necessary just for their own location.

All these presentation devices should use GPRS communications and be driven using the Presentation Device Protocol from the Tyrell3 system. Thus it makes sense to use common modules for the communications, data storage and audio announcements, adding the LED or LCD drivers as necessary. The emphasis being on producing a minimum of code.

John would write the code consulting with me on issues of handling the data. I will also provide support regarding modularisation of the code, and other bits and pieces I have learned from my past work on the original reliable IDU (TV style outdoor display).

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