Project Access Hope BIS 412 Systems Analysis and Design Applications Spring 2004 Project Developers: Philip Kelly Joseph Shaughnessy Daniel Vickers Project Liaison: Joseph Shaughnessy Organization Contact: Jolene Ness

Project Access Hope Problem Statement New Hope Ministries is using a legacy database called FileMaker Pro 5. No one at New Hope is familiar with the functionality of FileMaker, but they are able to use it for record keeping purposes. New clients will fill out an application which is then entered into the database. Clients will be added or updated accordingly. When New Hope Ministries needs reports from the database they will sometimes manually write down the records from the screen and tally the results. This becomes quite a burdensome task. New Hope Ministries has also had trouble with FileMaker not working properly, thus resulting in lost information and effectively lost time. There is also the problem with training new employees to use FileMaker. Lastly is the problem with the Children & Youth. They are currently in a separate database and New Hope Ministry would like to have them together with Clients in one overall database.

Project Access Hope Solutions Overview The database program Windows Access will be used for Project Access Hope thus allowing new versions to be easily updated by New Hope Ministries’ employees. The system will be built to eliminate all of the time consuming calculations, redundancy, and other problems. Since a commonly known database program will be used, training for the new database will be much easier as well. The database will be built to include both the Children & Youth and the Clients. It will also be able to keep track of the family members of both groups and will be able to switch a person back and forth between each group, if necessary. The database will also be able to generate the needed reports that New Hope has to generate for certain reasons.

Project Access Hope Lesson Learned It was very encouraging to work for a non-profit such as New Hope Ministries. We all learned a lot about an amazing organization and the extent to which they help others, it was quite astounding. It was a blessing to know that we are helping an organization that works to the greater good of God. The freedom to complete the project on our own with few limitations or rules was also a new experience and was an appreciated practice Communication with teammates and New Hope was a definite necessity and probably one of the key elements in the survival of the project