Decision Methods -- SDLC

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Great ideas turn into action by first creating a plan of action. There are many decision-making methods than can be used. The SDLC is an excellent way to implement a plan and help make decisions. Brainstorming and using other decision-making tools can also help an idea to grow into action. There are a lot of ways to end an excellent plan. Poor decision making skills and mismanagement can destroy any hopes of a plan reaching its goal. This was true in our scenario. The problem with the employees being in the wrong training class is a good example of a great idea being halted. The remarkable idea to have the business officers decide which classes their employees needed did not work because they were not aware of what the classes offered. Nor did they know how much of those classes would be beneficial to the users.

The end result was that this idea was obviously not followed through to the planning stage, or if it was it was not handled properly. The idea did produce same action in that the employees were trained, but in the wrong class.

The System Development Life Cycle (SDLC) plan includes six phases. These six phases are The Preliminary Investigation Phase, The Analysis Phase, The Design Phase, The Implementation Phase, and The Maintenance Phase. (1) If this plan had been followed there would have probably been much different results.

While evaluation is the one responsibility most often pushed to the side, it should be considered before any program implementation. Basic evaluation plans should help to address the following questions: 1)Was the purpose of the implementation accomplished? 2)Did the implementation operate as planned? 3)What outcomes were achieved?

The following things are important in planning for any...

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...s, help the users, correct errors, serve your customers. Allow time for errors. Always have contingency plans. What if the go-live fails? Make sure you have a way to regress to the legacy system to be able to function properly as a business. Consider going live by either pilot startup or parallel startup. A pilot startup means you would be running SAP for one group of end-users at a time opposed to all end-users at once; parallel startup suggests running both SAP and the old legacy system for a measure period to compare, reconcile and acclimate SAP into the working environment. Once everyone is confident about the new data warehouse then the old system can be gradually phased out, thus reducing the risk of mistakes and major complications.

Bibliography

http://www.muskalipman.com/VBObjects/SDLC.pdf

W. K. Kellogg Foundation Evaluation Handbook (1998) at 97.

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