Requirements Documentation for Operations Admin Systems

We were tasked by the engineering department of a railroad to provide requirements documents, functional design, process engineering, and project management services for two operations administration systems. The first system dealt with keeping track of position advertisements, displacements, and seniority evaluations for awards in a heavily unionized environment with multiple crafts, physical characteristics qualifications, and concurrent seniorities on multiple rosters due to promotional paths. A legacy system was in place but did not provide all required functionalities. We assessed the current system and worked out the business case for complete replacement on a modernized platform versus incremental improvements. Although an agile process could have reproduced many existing functionalities very quickly, we found that certain signal systems employees had the skills to continue to improve the legacy system, access to the source code, and compilers continued to be supported by the vendor. For all those reasons, we provided project management service to deliver the required improvements using the legacy platform. The second one is used by field supervision to record overtime approvals and provide audit compliance. We worked with subject matter experts, field supervision, and executive groups to determine system requirements and develop a process that captured all necessary information without introducing undue burden on supervisory personnel. The completed project plan was turned over to corporate I.T. and compliance groups for implementation.