Systems Analysis and Design : Part 2 Making the Business Case

Identifying and Selecting Systems Development Projects

Project Identification & Selection

The process
Identifying potential development projects
top management, steering committee, user department, development group
Classifying and ranking projects. value chain analysis, strategic alignment, potential benefits, resource
availability, project size, technical difficulty/risks
Selecting projects for development.
decisions factors ->decisions outcomes

Deliverables
A schedule of specific IS development projects.
An assurance that careful consideration was given to project selection.

Corporate Strategic Planning
an ongoing process that defines the mission, objectives and strategies of an organization.
==>Gain an understanding of the current enterprise
==>Top management must determine where it wants
the enterprise to be in the future.
==>A strategic plan can be developed to guide
this transition.

Three major steps.
The first step is the development of a mission statement. The company’s mission statement typically states, in very simple terms, what business the company is in.
After defining its mission, an organization then defines its objectives. The objective statements are “broad and timeless” goals for the organization. These goals are expressed as a series of statements that are either qualitative or quantitative, but typically do not contain details that are likely to change substantially over time.
Once a company has defined its mission and objectives, a competitive strategy is formulated. A competitive strategy is the method by which an organization attempts to achieve its mission and objectives.

Competitive strategies
-Low-cost producer, product differentiation, and product focus or niche are three generic competitive strategies competitive strategies.
-The low-cost producer strategy reflects competing in an industry on the basis of product or service cost to the consumer.
-The product differentiation strategy reflects capitalizing on a key product criterion requested by the market.
-The product focus or niche strategy is similar to both the low-cost and differentiation strategies but with a much narrower market focus.

IS Planning (ISP)-an orderly means of assessing the information needs of an organization and defining the systems, databases and technologies that will best satisfy those needs.
- Assess current IS related assets - human
resources,data, processes and technology.
- The blueprints of those resources are developed
to reach the organization’s objectives.
- A series of scheduled projects is defined.

Describing the Current Situation
Top-down planning
A generic information systems planning methodology that attempts
to gain a broad understanding of the information system needs of the
entire organization.
Begins by conducting an analysis of the organization’s mission,
objectives, strategy and determining the information requirements
needed to achieve each objective.
Involved top-level management

Bottom-up planning
A generic information systems planning methodology that identifies
and defines IS development projects based on problem solving or
taking advantage of some business opportunities.
Begins by the identification of business problems and opportunities.
It can be faster and less costly to develop IS project.
But it often fail to view the informational needs of the entire
organization.

Internet-based applications
When designing Internet-based applications, as opposed to intranet or extranet applications, designers are concerned with who the user is, the connection speed, and the access method.

Activities
Project Initiation
Focuses on activities designed to assist in organizing
team to conduct project planning.
Includes forming the project initiation team, establishing
customer relationships, developing a plan to get the
project started, setting project management procedures
and creating overall environment.
Project Planning
Define activities and the work needed to complete each
activity within a single project
Outcomes :
1. BPP (Baseline Project Plan)
2. SOW (Statement of Work)
Assumptions about resources availability and potential
problems will be made.

Assessing Project Feasibility
Economic
a process of identifying the financial benefits and costs associated with a development project.
Technical
a process of assessing the development organization’s ability to construct a proposed system.
Include hardware, software, and operating system to be used in development.
Operational
a process of assessing the degree to which a proposed system solves business problems or takes advantage of business opportunities.
Schedule
a process of assessing the degree to which the potential time frame and completion dates for all major activities within a project meet the deadline and constraints for affecting change.
Legal and contractual
a process of assessing potential legal and contractual ramifications due to the construction of a system.
Political
a process of evaluating how stakeholders within the organization view the proposed system.

Economic Feasibility
Identify financial benefits and costs associated with a development project
Benefits :
Tangible - can be measured in dollars and with certainty
Categories :
1. Cost of reduction and avoidance
2. Error reduction
3. Increased feasibility
4. Increased speed of activity
5. Improvement of mgmt planning & control
6. New markets & increase sales opportunity
Intangible - cannot be measured in dollars/with certainty
May have direct organizational benefits or societal impact
Tangible - Examples: items like hardware, software, operational
Intangible - Examples: loss of customer goodwill
One-time - associated with project initiation &
development and the startup of the system
- Example: new hardware, software purchase
Recurring - cost resulting from the ongoing evolution and use of the system
- Example: application software maintenance incremental data storage expense

Technical Feasibility
Assess the development organization’s ability to
construct a proposed system.
Assessment Factors:
1. Project size.
2. Project structure.
3. The development group’s experience with the application and technology area.
4. The user group’s experience with development projects and application area.

Building the BPP
Baseline Project Plan (BPP)
contains all information collected during project initiation and planning
Four Sections in BPP:
1. Introduction - project review & recommendation
2. System Description - alternatives & system description
3. Feasibility Assessment - economic, political & schedule, timeline and resource analysis
4. Management Issues - team configuration and management, communication plan, project standards and procedures, others

-The plan reflects the best estimate of the project’s scope, benefits, costs, risks, and resource requirements given the current understanding of the project. The BPP specifies detailed project activities for the next life cycle phase, analysis, and less detail for subsequent project phases (these depend on the results of the analysis phase). The content and format of a BPP depends on the size, complexity, and standards of an organization.