Modern Systems Analysis
and Design
Sixth Edition
Jeffrey A. Hoffer
Joey F. George
Joseph S. Valacich
Chapters 4, 3 and 5
Planning: Identification and Selection
& Initiation and Planning
Project and Project Management
A project is a [temporary] sequence of unique, complex, and
connected activities having one goal or purpose and that
must be completed by specific time, within budget, and
according to specification.
Project management is the process of scoping, planning,
staffing, organizing, directing, and controlling the
development of an acceptable system at a minimum cost
within a specified time frame.
Milestones are events that signify the accomplishment or
completion of major deliverables during a project.
―The scope of information systems today is the whole
enterprise.‖ (Hoffer)
Measures of Project Success
– The resulting information system is
acceptable to the customer.
– The system was delivered ―on time.‖
– The system was delivered ―within budget.‖
– The system development process had a
minimal impact on ongoing business
operations.
Causes of Project Failure
• Failure to establish upper-management commitment to the
project
• Lack of organization’s commitment to the system
development methodology
• Taking shortcuts through or around the system development
methodology
• Poor expectations management
• Premature commitment to a fixed budget and schedule
• Poor estimating techniques
• Overoptimism
• The mythical man-month (Brooks, 1975)
• Inadequate people management skills
• Failure to adapt to business change
• Insufficient resources
• Failure to ―manage to the plan‖
Phase 1 : Systems Planning
A. Project Identification and Selection (i.e., high level
planning)
B. Project Initiation and Planning (i.e., low level
planning)
Phase 1A: Project Identification and Selection
• Identify potential development projects
• Classify and rank projects
• Select projects
Identify Potential Development Projects
• Sources of projects
– Management and business units
– Managers who want to make a system more efficient
or less costly
– Formal planning groups
Identify Potential Development Projects
• Projects are identified by
– Top management
– Steering committee
– User departments
– Development group or senior IS staff
• Top-Down Identification
– Senior management or steering committee
– Focus is on global needs of organization
• Bottom-up Identification
– Business unit or IS group
– Don’t reflect overall goals of the organization
Source of Potential Project Identification Project Initiation
Projects and Selection And Planning
Top Down
•Top mgmt Schedule of
•Steering committee Evaluate, Projects
prioritize, and 1. ….
schedule 2. ….
Bottom Up projects 3. ….
•User departments
•Development group
Classify and Rank Projects
• Classifying and Ranking IS Development Projects
– Performed by top management, steering committee,
business units of IS development group
– Value chain analysis is often used
• Method to analyze an organization’s activities to determine
where value is added and costs are incurred
Select Projects
• Selecting IS Development Projects
– Process of considering short and long-term projects
– Projects most likely to achieve business objectives are
selected
– Decision requires consideration of:
• Perceived and real needs
• Potential and ongoing projects
• Current organizational environment
• Existing and available resources
• Evaluation criteria
IdentifyingProjects IS Development Projects
Select and Selecting
• Selecting IS Development Projects
– Outcomes
• Project Acceptance
• Project Rejection
• Delay
• Refocus
• End-User Development
• Proof of Concept
Identifying and Selecting IS Development Projects
• Deliverables and Outcomes
– Primary Deliverable
• Schedule of specific IS development projects
– Outcomes
• Assurance that careful consideration was given to project
selection
• Clear understanding of project’s relation to organizational
objectives
Identifying and Selecting IS Development Projects
• Knowledge of overall organizational business strategy
– Improves project selection and identification process
– Provides sound guidance throughout the systems
development life cycle
Phase 1B: Project Initiation and Planning (Milestone 1)
• Organize team
• Establish mgmt procedures
• Scope
• Feasibility/risk analysis and Strategic Assessment
• Estimation
• Scheduling
Scope
Scope defines the boundaries of a project—What part
of the business is to be studied, analyzed, designed,
constructed, implemented, and ultimately improved?
Define Scope
Statement of scope includes:
• General project info – project name, sponsor, project team
• Problem/opportunity stmt
• Project objectives
• Project description
• Identification of users
• Benefits
• Constraints
• Duration
• Costs
Problems/Opportunities
• From preliminary info, begin to identify potential
problems / opportunities
• At this point, do not worry about causes and effects
• Good Examples: productivity is slipping; orders are going
unfilled; inventory is usually understocked; customer
dissatisfaction; opportunity for increased sales; opportunity to
capture market share
• Poor Examples: not enough time to write system; not enough
people to write system; system will cost too much; technology
does not exist; users are stupid (these will be reflected in
feasibility analysis)
Project Objectives
• What system should achieve for the company
• Very general at this point
• Examples:
– Enable the marketing department to accurately track
and forecast customer buying trends
– Decrease the number of trips technicians must make
to complete a customer request
– Reduce costs and labor time of publishing
Project Description
• General project information, including the purpose
• Example:
– A new information system will be constructed that will
collect all customer purchasing activity, support display
and reporting of sales information, aggregate data, and
show trends in order to assist marketing personnel in
understanding dynamic market conditions.
Identification of Users
• Direct
• Indirect
Cost-Benefit Analysis Techniques
Costs:
• Development costs are one time costs that will not recur after
the project has been completed.
• Operating costs are costs that tend to recur throughout the
lifetime of the system. Such costs can be classified as:
– Fixed costs — occur at regular intervals but at relatively fixed
rates.
– Variable costs — occur in proportion to some usage factor.
Benefits:
• Tangible benefits are those that can be easily quantified.
• Intangible benefits are those benefits believed to be difficult or
impossible to quantify.
Costs
• Tangible • One-time
– Hardware – Systems development
– Labor – Hardware/software
– Operational – User training
– …. – Site preparation
– Data conversion
• Intangible
– Loss of customer goodwill • Recurring
– Employee morale – Maintenance
– …. – Data storage expense
– Communications expense
– Software licenses
– Supplies (paper, toner, etc.)
Benefits and Constraints
• Tangible benefits • Constraints
– Cost reduction – Schedule: project must be
– Error reduction completed before 11/27/01
– Increase efficiency – Cost: the system cannot
– Increase sales cost more than $100,000
– …. – Technology: the system
must be online, use DB2,
run on a Novell network,
• Intangible benefits etc.
– Improved planning and – Policy: the system must use
control double-entry accounting
– Improved decision making
– Improve employee morale
– More timely info
– ….
Feasibility Analysis
Feasibility is the measure of how beneficial or practical
the development of an information system will be to an
organization.
Feasibility analysis is the process by which feasibility is
measured.
Feasibility / Risk Assessment
• Technical feasibility is a measure of the practicality
of a specific technical solution and the availability of
technical resources and expertise.
• Economic feasibility is a measure of the cost-
effectiveness of a project or solution.
• Legal and contractual feasibility is a measure of the
legal constraints on the project.
• Operational feasibility is a measure of how well the
solution will work in the organization. It is also a
measure of how people feel about the system/project.
• Schedule feasibility is a measure of how reasonable
the project timetable is.
Assessing Technical Feasibility
• Technical Feasibility
• Assessment of the development organization’s ability to
construct a proposed system
• Project risk can be assessed based upon:
– Project size
– Project structure
– Development group’s experience with the application
– User group’s experience with development projects and the
application area
Assessing Economic Feasibility
• Cost – Benefit Analysis
• Determine Benefits
– Tangible Benefits
– Intangible Benefits
• Determine Costs
– Tangible Costs
– Intangible Costs
– One-Time Costs
– Recurring Costs
Strategic Assessment
• Productivity
• Differentiation
• Management
Estimation
• Estimate of resources, such as human effort, time, and
cost
• Estimation is extremely difficult and (usually)
inaccurate
• Some methods of estimation:
– Decomposition
– COCOMO
– Automated estimation tools (i.e., BYL, SLIM)
– Expert opinion / judgment
Decomposition: Lines of Code (LOC) Estimation
• Simplest way to measure the size of a project
• Oldest and most widely used size metric
• Line counts can vary between programming languages
and coding styles.
• Code line = a source line that has other content than
just comment or whitespace; this includes executable
code, data declarations and procedure declarations.
Decomposition: Lines of Code (LOC) Estimation
• In VB, a physical line ends in a newline; a logical line
can consist of several physical lines joined with the
―_‖ line continuation character.
• In VB 3-6, form and class declarations are included at
the start of a .frm or a .cls file; these declarations are
not included in any of the line counts.
• Attribute stmts in source files are included in the line
count.
• At a minimum, the usual procedure has 2 lines of
code: the declaration line and the end line
Decomposition: Lines of Code (LOC) Estimation
A suggestion for classification of VB project sizes,
based on total number of physical lines:
Lines Size
0 – 9999 Small
10,000 – 49,999 Medium
50,000 – 99,999 Semi-Large
100,000+ Large
(The classification is based on experience with VB projects. As programming
languages differ in their uses and power expression, this classification may not be
directly usable for other languages.)
(Aivosto.com 2004)
Estimated LOC Estimated project Estimated effort
Cost ($) Required (PM)
Function Optimistic Most Pessimistic Expected $/line Line / Cost PM
Likely Month
Accounts 1800 2400 2650 2340 $ 14 315 $ 32,760 7.4
receivable
Accounts 4100 5200 7400 5380 20 220 107,600 24.4
payable
General 4600 6900 8600 6800 20 220 136,000 30.9
Ledger
Monthly 2950 3400 3600 3350 18 240 60,300 13.9
payroll
Weekly 4050 4900 6200 4950 22 200 108,900 24.7
payroll
Benefits 2000 2100 2450 2140 28 140 59,920 15.2
Employee 6600 8500 9800 8400 18 300 151,200 28.0
tracking
Totals 33,360 $ 656,680 144.5
Scheduling
• Gantt
– Very simple
– Bar chart
– Does not show interrelationships
• PERT/CPM
– More complex
– Network
– Shows interrelationships
Project Management Tools & Techniques
A PERT chart is a graphical network model that
depicts a project’s tasks and the relationships between
those tasks.
A Gantt chart is a simple horizontal bar chart that
depicts project tasks against a calendar. Each bar
represents a named project task. The tasks are listed
vertically in the left-hand column. The horizontal axis
is a calendar timeline.
Graphical diagrams that depict project plans
(a) A Gantt Chart and (b) A PERT chart
Scheduling Strategies
Forward scheduling establishes a project start date
and then schedules forward from that date. Based on
the planned duration of required tasks, their
interdependencies, and the allocation of resources to
complete those tasks, a projected project completion
date is calculated.
Reverse scheduling establishes a project deadline and
then schedules backward from that date. Essentially,
tasks, their duration, interdependencies, and resources
must be considered to ensure that the project can be
completed by the deadline.
Task Splitting and Delaying
• The critical path for a project is that sequence of dependent
tasks that have the largest sum of most likely durations. The
critical path determines the earliest possible completion date of
the project.
– Tasks that are on the critical path cannot be delayed without
delaying the entire project schedule. To achieve resource
leveling, critical tasks can only be split.
• The slack time available for any noncritical task is the amount
of delay that can be tolerated between the starting time and
completion time of a task without causing a delay in the
completion date of the entire project.
– Tasks that have slack time can be delayed to achieve resource
leveling
Output of Project Initiation and Planning (Milestone 1)
• Statement of scope
• Feasibility / risk and strategic assessment
• Estimates (money, effort, time)
• Schedule
• Don’t forget to include: System Proposal Form, cover
memo, cover page, table of contents, and page
numbers