Mcbride Network

The purpose of this Network Requirements Document is to delineate the business, technical and user requirements for the Sioux Falls Office of McBride Financial Services. This document will also include a logical design of the local area network (LAN).

McBride Financial Services is a start-up regional mortgage lender headquartered in Boise, Idaho. The firm will specialize in conventional, FHA, and VA loans for home purchasing and refinancing. The company intends to expand its operations into Wyoming, Montana, North Dakota and South Dakota. The company’s expansion has necessitated the design, procurement and deployments of a LAN for each of the eight offices. In addition, a Wide Area Network (WAN) to connect each of the sites to the home office located in Boise, Idaho is envisioned. Team B has been assigned to create this document to the project sponsor, Mr. Hugh McBride. The creation of the Physical Design for the LAN at Sioux Falls is a follow-on to this effort and is considered out of scope.

Abram LaBelle met with Hugh McBride and discussed the company's needs. A transcript of the conversation has been created by Smith Consulting and this is what we have found.

Summary of Transcript

Hugh explains that McBride Financial Services is going to be the preeminent provider of low cost mortgage services in its region. He states that McBride will offer mortgages to homebuyers, specializing in first time buyers and problem credit clients. We’ll make our profits by strictly controlling costs. Rather than having a large staff of brokers and secretaries to sell financing packages to each customer. The staff will be kept small so McBride could rely upon technology to let the customers sell themselves on the mortgages they want.

Needs

• Customers will need to enter their own mortgage applications online.

• Responses of approvals or denials will be sent electronically.

• The loan decisions will be made at the home office in Boise, by the lending committee so they need special access to the database from anywhere.

• There will be eight offices. The first two will open in Boise, Idaho and Sioux Falls, South Dakota, One in Montana, two in Wyoming, two in North Dakota and one more in South Dakota in Rapid City.

• In the main office there will be three brokers and two admin assistants.

• Each office will have 2 вЂ" 3 brokers. Each of the brokers will work on

Commission and will provide their own laptop computers.

• The company will provide the networks, Internet access, printers, fax and telephones for each office.

• In addition to the brokers, each location will have an experienced

Receptionist in the office from 8am вЂ" 5pm Monday through Friday

• They’ll range in size of physical space will be from about 800 square feet to around 1200 square feet.

• The office layout has not been determined.

“This is how Hugh described it: Most of the offices haven’t been leased yet. We’ve identified spaces that we would like to occupy, but the details aren’t finalized. The spaces we’re looking at are located on the ground floor either in office parks on strip office building in the downtown areas of the selected cities. Being on the ground floor has a number of advantages, but, with the right location and lease package, we would consider a space on a higher floor of an office building. For example, the Boise office is already leased. As the home office, it needed more space since it will handle the administrative needs of the whole company, and we’ve got just less than 1200 square feet. Unfortunately, we couldn’t find that much space on the ground floor in the right location in the city. We actually ended up occupying two spaces in the building. On the

ground floor, we’ve got an 800 square foot space where the brokers will meet

the customers. The last tenant did a beautiful job in finishing the space вЂ" a lot

of oak paneling and hardwood flooring. We don’t want to change a thing.

The administrative people will work up on the 7 th floor in a space that is just

under 300 square feet. We’ll have to figure out some way to connect the

admin staff with the brokers so that we’re not running up and down the stairs

or calling back and forth on the telephone to exchange information.”

• The Sioux Falls office is 900 square feet on the ground floor in a strip office building. The space is just one large room right now. The landlord has given us an allowance for TIs, which need to be designed.

• In terms of special needs, each office will have a file storage area, a computer/phone area, and private meeting area for client broker meetings. Depending on the office size.

• Some of the locations will have private offices, while others will have cubes with one or two private meeting rooms. Each office will also have a client waiting area, and each of these waiting areas will have self serve kiosks with computers that can be used by clients to access the company’s website and their own personal applications.

• The customer area will be 200 вЂ" 300 square feet, but needs to be designed in such a way to allow clients enough space to maintain their privacy while entering all information into the computer.

• Security concerns, since we are dealing with personal financial information, all the technology that will be implemented has to be on the leading edge

• We also want to implement some kind of internal security, In addition to technical security, I am concerned with physical security of the

• The Boise office is in a downtown area of Boise dominated by different banks.

• The Sioux Falls office is on the edge of a residential neighborhood. It is along two main. Both offices