Question

With limited management resources available and the pressure to deploy new business
solutions quickly, measuring productivity in systems development often becomes a low priority
for many organizations. IT departments at smaller companies in particular seem reluctant to
institute policies to track the performance of development projects. Some companies,
however, have been forced to adopt productivity measurement methods, and are reaping
rewards for doing so. For example, national retailer Belk Inc. had to adopt productivity metrics
as a means of reducing devastating system failures. Aubrey, the veteran IT consultant that
Belk hired, was used to nursing client organisations through crashes that periodically downed
their systems. But nothing had prepared Aubrey for the failure rate at Belk. Soon after joining
the company as senior VP for systems development, Aubrey discovered that Belk’s batch
systems went down an astounding 800 times a month. The Charlotte, North Carolina, outfit, a
private company with estimated annual revenue of $1.7 billion, paid a heavy price for the
constant bandaging: In 1997, Belk spent $1.1 million of its $30 million IT budget on unplanned
maintenance. To steady the systems, Aubrey instituted a series of tracking measures.
Programmers began logging their time. Required software functions were carefully counted in
application development projects. Belk compared its cycle time, defect rates, and productivity
with competitors’ figures. And systems managers were required to draw up blueprints for
reducing the crashes—with the results reviewed in their performance evaluations. The
transition to tracking the IT department’s performance was painful but worthwhile. Belk’s
systems became more stable—monthly disruptions dropped to 480 incidents, a figure Aubrey hopes to slash by another 30 percent. Unplanned maintenance costs also have been brought
under control, with initial cuts in unplanned maintenance expenses of $800,000.
Discuss the basic steps in the traditional systems development life cycle?

Answer 1

Basic steps in traditional systems development life cycle:

1. Planning:

   This phase focuses on collective the facts about how the product will work, what will be the outcome, is it meeting the end-users requirement, what will be the overall cost of the product making and what procedures need to be followed. The overall planning related to the project should be done in this phase.

2. Requirement:

The goal of this phase is that IT consultants should meet business organizations or end-user and discuss there requirements, state the objective so that the project flow can become very smooth.

3. Designing:

   This phase is used to start the project according to the requirements, the model is build, all the loopholes are found and corrected, a logic is build and developers starts coding or designing the product.

4. Software Development:

   This phase is responsible for building the overall product.

5 Testing:

After the product is developed, it is important to test it before deploying so that in case of error it can be corrected before reaching the hands of end-users. If there is some error then it is corrected by debugger team and checked again repeatedly unless and until the product becomes error free.

6 Deployment:

Now, the nest step is to deploy the product so that end-users can use it and decide for themselves whether or not they like the product, or if it is meeting their needs or not. The can further request for additional requirements and developer team has to further add it in the product.

7. Maintenance:

Once the product is deployed, it becomes an important factor to continuously analyze the product, to check if the product is running well in the market, if there is any new or ignored error which is causing some trouble. Everything thing should be well-maintained. Even if, the product is deployed, the responsibility never ends.

Maintenance team can run survey to collect information about whether the end-users require any more changes or features and then report it to the development team, so that they can add it and improve the product and satisfy the end-customers.