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The Unicorn is the UK’s flagship theatre for young people. Their home is a purpose-built, state-of-the-art building, located on the south bank of the River Thames in London. As well as creating their own productions, the Unicorn hosts visits by some of the UK and the World’s other great theatre companies for young people. They stage over 620 performances a year. It was actually set up in 1947 as a mobile theatre that entertained children from the back of a van. Today, the theatre is a registered charity and employs 34 people. |
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You can have a look at the Unicorn theatre website to get an idea of their corporate identity: http://www.unicorntheatre.com. The website has a very casual theme and is very clearly aimed at children and teachers. The theatre holds a lot of drama workshops that are attended by pupils from local schools in London. The theatre building itself is new and very modern in design - if you Google it you will find plenty of Unicorn Theatre images. |
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Up until now, the theatre has always taken its bookings by phone or e-mail. There is an e-mail link in the website. A booking clerk (Rita) works in the office and records all the booking requests in a special diary. The bookings are written out by hand. The booking clerk writes down the name of the customer, which performance they want to see and allocates their seats and tickets. She then takes payment by credit card. |
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Paula Marshall is the new Theatre Administrator. It is her job to make sure that the booking system works efficiently. "The main problem with the current system is that everything is stored in one book - booking details, customer details, etc. If the book were lost, the theatre would lose track of all its bookings. That could cost us a lot of money and make us look unprofessional. Rita writes everything in by hand too and sometimes the other staff can't read her handwriting. We need a better, faster way of organising our bookings and allocating seats. We really need to know when the theatre is fully booked for a certain performance. It would be good if the booking clerk could see a chart or something of the theatre seating - she likes visual tools to help her. Rita needs to know which seats have already been allocated when a customer tries to make a booking. I'd like you to make a prototype system for a forthcoming version of Cinderella. All tickets cost £12 and there is a £3.00 delivery charge per ticket. There is no charge if customers collect the tickets themselves. It would be good if that price could change as each show has a different pricing structure. We need to record the customer details, seats allocated and how much they need to pay. The new system must be easy to use and read. It must also be re-usable for different performances. The theatre seats 150, by the way...". |
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At the moment there are 5 bookings in Rita's diary for Cinderella on 20th Jan 2010. This is the data you will use when building your new system. Joanne Cross, 01603 456445, 3 tickets, delivered Here is an example spreadsheet. |
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