Arsalan has been employed in ABC College of Engineering (The College) as a faculty member for last 10 years. Recently, he is promoted to the position of Director of Information Technology (I.T.). The...

Arsalan has been employed in ABC College of Engineering (The College) as a faculty member
for last 10 years. Recently, he is promoted to the position of Director of Information Technology

(I.T.). The college is ranked among the top colleges in Asia in the field of Engineering. At present,

the College has enrolled 1500 full-time and 1000 evening program students. The College has been

struggling for the past 10 years to provide the facility of wireless access to its students and faculty

members.

Arsalan, instantly after getting promoted as Director I.T., started working on a project in

collaboration with 3 faculty members from his department, which involves providing all

educational material on tablets to students and switching conventional books to e-books. If the

project is successful, students would have to lease the tablets from the College for a period of one

year. Arsalan visited different colleges to learn about the system they were using, to help him to

develop his own system. In his opinion, this would benefit the students and the teachers. Students

would have to bear the cost of purchasing a tablet spread over a period of one year and would not

have to buy expensive books every semester since e-books are more cost efficient. Similarly,

teachers would not have to carry piles of books to class for every lecture and all the material would

be readily available in their tablet. Searching for a particular page or material would also be very

efficient.

Arsalan pitched this idea to his colleagues in September, 2019 and choose email as a source of

communication. However, some of the senior faculty members, including chairpersons of

Mathematics and English departments opposed this idea arguing that this would result in students

quitting the habit of book reading and also the teachers would not be comfortable with this style

of teaching. The chairperson of Computer Science department argued that students already have

laptop computers with them and asking them to purchase a new tablet would burden them. The

director overseeing evening program also argued that their students would resist a sudden increase

in the fee structure due to tablets being purchased for them.
Arsalan worked very hard for the project and was very hopeful for its success. Therefore, he was

surprised after receiving such comments and resistance from such senior members of his college.

It is February, 2020 now and the project has still not been approved. Arsalan has now accepted the

failure of his project and is trying to learn about the mistakes he made that lead to the projects’

failure.

a) Identify the causes of failure of the project?







b) List down the issues in Arsalan’s tablet project with respect to 3-sphere model of the

system management.