Chapters 4, 3 and 5

Planning: Identification and Selection & Initiation and Planning

Modern Systems Analysisand Design

Seventh Edition

Jeffrey A. Hoffer Joey F. George

Joseph S. Valacich

Outline

• Planning– Project Identification and Selection

• Identify potential projects

• Classify and rank projects

• Select projects

– Project Initiation and Planning (Milestone 1)• Scope (9 parts)

• Feasibility/Risk Assessment

• Strategic Assessment

• Estimates using LOC

• Schedule using PERT and Gantt

Project and Project Management

Project – 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 – 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 – Events that signify the accomplishment or completion of major

deliverables during a project.

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 prj• 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”• Poorly trained/educated project managers

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

Three main steps:1.Identifying potential development projects2.Classifying and ranking IS development projects3.Selecting IS development projects

Identify Potential Development Projects

• Sources of projects– Top management

– Steering committee

– User departments/functional area

– 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

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

Identifying and Selecting IS Development Projects

• Selecting IS Development Projects

Select Projects

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

• Knowledge of overall organizational business strategy– Improves project selection and identification process

– Provides sound guidance throughout the systems development life cycle

Milestone 1

Milestone 1

Phase 1B: Project Initiation and Planning (Milestone 1)

• Organize team• Establish mgmt procedures• Scope• Feasibility/risk analysis• Strategic assessment• Estimation• Scheduling

Scope

• Defines the boundaries of a project—What part of the business is to be studied, analyzed, designed, constructed, implemented, and ultimately improved?

• 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)

• This can be in paragraph form or in a bulleted list.

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

• This should be in a bulleted list.

Project Description

• General project information, including the purpose, stated in one paragraph

• 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

• Identification of who will directly and indirectly be affected by the proposed system

• These should be categorized as (in a bulleted list): – Direct

– Indirect

Cost-Benefit Analysis Techniques

Benefits are generally considered in terms of cost-benefit. However, only the benefits will be listed in the milestone as bulleted lists (tangible and intangible).

Benefits:• Tangible benefits: those that can be easily quantified. • Intangible benefits: those benefits believed to be

difficult or impossible to quantify.

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.

Benefit Examples

• Tangible benefits– Cost reduction– Error reduction– Increase efficiency– Increase sales– ….

• Intangible benefits– Improved planning

and control– Improved decision

making– Improve employee

morale– More timely info– ….

Cost Examples

• Tangible– Hardware

– Labor

– Operational

– ….

• Intangible– Loss of customer

goodwill

– Employee morale

– ….

• One-time– Systems development

– Hardware/software

– User training

– Site preparation

– Data conversion

• Recurring– Maintenance

– Data storage expense

– Communications expense

– Software licenses

– Supplies (paper, toner, etc.)

Constraints

• Anything that might constrain or limit the proposed project

• Examples:– Schedule: project must be completed before 11/27/15

– Cost: the system cannot cost more than $100,000

– Technology: the system must be online, use DB2, run on a Novell network, etc.

– Policy: the system must use double-entry accounting

Duration and Costs (in the Scope Stmt)

• Duration– A one sentence description of how long the project will take

based on the Gantt and PERT diagrams.

• Costs– A one sentence description of how much the project will

cost based on the project estimates using the decomposition method (LOC).

Feasibility/Risk Assessment

Feasibility – The measure of how beneficial or practical the development

of an information system will be to an organization.

Feasibility/Risk Assessment– The process by which feasibility is measured.

– Assign a score to each factor and an overall feasibility score.

– Measured by five factors (TELOS):• Technical

• Economic

• Legal/contractual

• Operational

• Schedule

Feasibility / Risk Assessment

• Technical feasibility– A measure of the practicality of a specific technical solution

and the availability of technical resources and expertise. – 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 Technical Feasibility

• Economic feasibility – A measure of the cost-effectiveness of a project or solution.

– Cost – Benefit Analysis

• Legal and Contractual feasibility – A measure of the legal constraints on the project.

• Operational feasibility – 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 – A measure of how reasonable the project timetable is.

Strategic Assessment

• An assessment of how well the project meets the strategic goals of the organization.

• Assign a score to each factor and an overall score.

• Three factors (PDM):– Productivity

• How well the proposed project will improve the productivity of the users

– Differentiation• How well the proposed project will differentiate the company from

its competitors

– Management• How well the proposed project will improve the management of the

organization and its information

Estimation

• Estimate of resources, such as human effort, time, and cost

• Estimation is extremely difficult and (usually) inaccurate

• Some methods of estimation:– Decomposition (the method we will use)

– 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, 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)

Function Optimistic Most Likely

Pessimistic Expected $/line Line / Month

Cost PM

Accounts receivable

1800 2400 2650 2340 $ 14 315 $ 32,760 7.4

Accounts payable

4100 5200 7400 5380 20 220 107,600 24.4

General Ledger

4600 6900 8600 6800 20 220 136,000 30.9

Monthly payroll

2950 3400 3600 3350 18 240 60,300 13.9

Weekly payroll

4050 4900 6200 4950 22 200 108,900 24.7

Benefits 2000 2100 2450 2140 28 140 59,920 15.2

Employee tracking

6600 8500 9800 8400 18 300 151,200 28.0

Totals 33,360 $ 656,680 144.5

Estimated LOC Estimated projectCost ($)

Estimated effortRequired (PM)

Decomposition Example

Estimation: Decomposition

What is expected in the milestone:•Identify the functions needed in your project•Identify optimistic, most likely, and pessimistic LOC•Calculate expected LOC, cost, and PM•Calculate team PM, given the number of members of your team•Provide those above items in a table.•Provide an explanation of the following below the table:

– What the functions mean (one sentence each)

– How the numbers were calculated (provide formulas)

– What the total cost and PM indicate for this project

Scheduling

• Gantt– 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.

– Very simple

– Bar chart

– Does not show interrelationships

• PERT/CPM– Graphical network model that depicts a project’s tasks and

the relationships between those tasks

– More complex; network

– Shows interrelationships

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.

Scheduling: Critical Path and Slack Time

• Critical Path – 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.

• Slack Time – Available for any noncritical task– 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 assessment• Strategic assessment• Estimates (using Decomposition – LOC)• Schedule (using Gantt and PERT)

• Don’t forget to include: System Proposal Form, cover memo, cover page, table of contents, and page numbers