Indian

Institute of Management Calcutta

PGDM 51 / FP 2014 Term II, 2014 - 15
Information Technology and Systems

Module II Project
Plagiarism in any form will be treated with utmost severity and would include awarding
permanent F grade in the course.
This is a group assignment to be undertaken by four people. Marks allotted to the project is 20.
The objective of this task is to test your ability to map a decision making situation onto Excel and would
entail deploying appropriate Excel functions and features for collecting necessary data from the web,
building a model, and presenting the outcome. It is in no way a test of your programming skills.
Uniqueness, flexibility, elegance will be few of the points on which your work is going to be evaluated.
Make reasonable assumptions wherever necessary and state them clearly in your process note.
Your submission will be in the form of the following documents:
1. An Excel workbook named as <GroupNo >_Project.xlsx. The work book will contain the
spreadsheet, all data that you have used
2. A pdf file containing
a. Assumptions your group made;
b. Process note - The process note should talk about your assumptions and your thought process
regarding data, model and presentation of outcome. You could slso mention difficulties you faced
c. Source of data in the form of URLs
Remember:

Submisssions without Data Sources and Process Note will not be evaluated.
Only files uploaded on the Moodle system will be evaluated
Submission deadline is Mid-night of Saturday December 6, 2014. Late submissions can be
accepted with penalty of 4 marks per day of delay beyond deadline
Evaluation is going to be based on the files submitted. There will be no opportunity to present
your work.

Avoid waiting until the last moment and submit early. The instructor is not going to be responsible for
your failure to upload a file.

Custom Vacation Inc.

You have been given the responsibility of preparing a spreadsheet that helps one to plan custom vacation
packages for families. The final outcome would be a nice vacation within a given budget and a given time
span. While the scope of the work is pretty flexible, there are certain expectations that need to be met.
You have the complete freedom to decide what the dimensions of nice are.
(a)

(b)
(c)

(d)
(e)

There should be option of constructing a tour circuit by first selecting a state to visit, using a drop
down list on the visual display. The list of tourist destinations should then appear automatically
depending on the choice. The tour circuit will be constructed by choosing towns of tourist interest
from this list, and deciding on the sequence in which the places will be visited. For example a
client could choose Bihar as the state to visit and then construct the circuit with Patna, Nalanda,
Rajgir and Gaya in that order.
To increase flexibility in travel time, there could be a facility for selecting mode of transport.
For the tour circuit your spreadsheet should allow for analysing two package options based on
mode of transport (Air, Train, Car), and hotel quality (star rating, customer feedback etc.) for
travelling from one place to other, activities, side tours and length of vacation. A tour starts from
the first city and ends in the last one. Analysis of each package should result in a visual output of
bar graphs comparing scores in budget, flexibility, and other metrics of your choice. Remember
that outputs need to be scaled so that comparisons can be made on the same chart for the package
options that can also be selected through radio buttons on Option 1 or Option 2 (radio buttons are
simple extension of the check-boxes).
Each bar graph should also have check box options to enable selection of various modes of
transportation (Air and car; Air, Car and Train; Train only etc.).
There should be a way of giving the clients some idea about how much it would be if bought now
vs. two months later (this is in consideration of the significant savings that could accrue if the
flight is booked much in advance).

The bottom line is that this would enable the client to get a clear feel of What would constitute getting
the most out of his/her trip.
At the time of conceptualizing the model, you may keep the following guidelines in mind:
a)
The users of the spreadsheet will be city persons and that feature in the decision making
b)
The budget would be flexible with an upper limit. But (s)he would want value for money and
would feel comfortable if it is kept within certain limit.
c)
Tours and trips must be carefully considered
d)
A bad hotel will quickly ruin the trip and also the user would have high expectation for the
services that (s)he pay good money for.
You will have to download from web all necessary data like airfare, the distance, rates for the type of cars
needed, temperature of the place, hotel charges, etc needed for creating the spreadsheet.
The data used in the project should be realistic as far as possible. There will be some marks allotted to the
data- collection method. More stress will be laid on the technical uses of a variety of formulas, graphs,
and formats. We would prefer that you avoid using VBA to build the solution.