Volunteer Management System

The Volunteer Management System (VMS) aims to partially automate the work scheduling process and the tracking of working hours for volunteers under the employ of a local science center. The currently implemented system involves the volunteers signing up on a weekly list to confirm availability for duty which will then be used by the human resources department’s staff to construct a weekly duty roster .This method is tedious and time consuming, for both volunteers and staff. By creating and developing an intuitive system, VMS, the process will be streamlined, joining the availability list sign up and the weekly roster generator into one software application. This will save considerable amount of man hours, as it takes the decision making process of assigning volunteers to a timeslot in the weekly roster, based on their criterion, and relegates it to the application. The target users of this application will be the HR subdivision in charge of managing the volunteers, namely the Volunteers Management Unit (VMU) and the volunteers themselves. The project will adopt the Iterative and incremental development methodology, which promotes constant reevaluation, and will be built on the java programming language and developed on the Netbeans IDE, for the GUI and algorithm implementation. The database section to store the volunteers’ data will be handled with Microsoft Access. In conclusion, this software application will save a lot of time and effort on the part of the staff and increase the efficiency with which the volunteers are managed.