Question

Beginning an IT project includes a fundamental skill of making the best product decision for your organization. One decision to make at the beginning of your project plan is to consider options available for your deliverable.

IT projects can be based on existing, off-the-shelf software that is customized to meet the needs of the project deliverables. In other cases, IT projects can be built from the ground up, in-house. Imagine you and your colleagues are consultants who have been asked to weigh in on the custom vs. off-the-shelf question at the beginning of an IT project at a Fortune 500 company.

Respond to the following in a minimum of 175 words:

• What are 2 benefits of choosing and customizing off-the-shelf software to meet your project’s needs vs. building the entire project in-house?
• What are the drawbacks?
• Consider cost, the impact on the in-house team’s development staff, the software’s ability to grow with future project requirements, and how the choice will affect project support and maintenance.

Answer 1

off shell softwares are standard products which are manufactured in bulk for the general public They have a very large base of customers providing many features at one platform.

The Benifits of off shell softwares are as follows:

1. Offf the shell sofwares aregenerally cost effective in nature which is an important factor in development of any software and this cost effectiveness is due to the fact that a large segment of the customer is tragetted.

2. Off the shell software are genrally customised which helps the customers to cater to their exact needs.

   The customisation can be either an add on to the xisting software or modification of the feature of the existing software

Ans 2) As we all know that custimisation is one ofthe biggestadvantage but it is also a disadvantage in th sense that cutsomers have to pay for the services extra for which they don't require.Moreover another disadvantage is that the softwares generally comes with subscription for a year or particular month. if the customers dosen't purchases the softwares the customer support is also not given.

Basically oof the shell project cost heavy maintenance and heavy cost on unnessary and features and functionality.