Systems Development and Project Management

1101 Words3 Pages

Systems Development and Project Management

Information technology is an important part of a company’s future success. In order for companies to move into the future compressively they must continue to enhance their Information technology. The systems development process and the management of it are important aspects of strategically enhancing a company’s information technology system in place or better it for the future. Systems development can be simply be described as the process you go through to develop the product or products that meet your organizations needs. This type of development process is described as the waterfall process.

There are a couple of development processes, but the one mainly talked about is the Waterfall process. The other type of development process is the Iterative process. This type of process is used mostly by commercial developers for a customer who is not quite sure what they want developed for them. Each one of the processes has a model that describes a vast amount of tasks or activities that occur as you utilize either of the processes. To name a few models you have, the Waterfall model, the Spiral, the prototype and the Evolutionary model. To explain one model, an example would be the Waterfall. The model is pretty much the same as the Waterfall process. This particular model shows progression of your project. You start with your input being received, processed and sent to the next activity as in input and the process continues until you have your final product as your output. Each process and module has it positives and negatives depending on what type of product or system you are developing.

According to Travis Bakersville in his article, “The Impact of Computer Supported Technologies on Information Systems Development”, there are five types of system development methodologies. The types are the structured approach, the prototyping/iterative approach, rapid application development, object oriented, and other types. Based on the above types 76.5% of organizations utilize the Structured approach. Of those different methodologies, a survey of done to see how companies were acquiring their methodology. According to the Judy Wynekoop, 35% or organizations purchased their methodology and 65% developed their own in-house.

There are numerous surveys and comments from various IT managers that believe that each and every project development needs to use a methodology. However, a consensus is that not one particular methodology is appropriate for every project development process and each IS manager reports modifying methodologies depending on the project.

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