Business Simulation
The Business Simulation website was built for the Leiden University course IBIA. During this course I&E students learn about making long-term strategic IT choices for companies.
The website we build will help them in this learning process. Students are put in different teams and are tasked with selecting and buying new software for their company. First, they must select certain assumptions about the software. For example that the software must be cloud-based. After this, they can look at different relevant software packages and make a choice for the package they think is the best fit.
They face the described above and multiple other decisions in the process and if these decisions don't work well together it will lead to additional costs for the company. This way students learn that each small decision matters for the big picture. The website creates a more realistic feeling for the students about decision-making.
We build the first step of the simulation, but the plan is to greatly extend the capabilities of the website with future LUDev teams.
Our customer is Tyron Offerman. He is the teacher for the course IBIA. He wants to create a big business simulation where students can make choices about multiple processes in a company. Some of our team members already knew Tyron because they followed multiple courses that he teaches. We had meetings every two weeks and these were mostly online due to covid and busy schedules. We showed demo's during these meetings and talked about changing some requirements. The communication was good and frequent enough to get a good final result. He was very pleased with our product.
Our team consisted of 6 members. We had two computer science & economics students, three bioinformatics students and one computer science student. We held meetings every week, both online and onsite. We had some start-up problems in the beginning, mainly with communication, lack of knowledge about the used technologies and meeting deadlines but everything turned out good in the end.