Project Management

Initiating projects, determining project feasibility, scheduling projects, and planning and then managing activities and team members for productivity are all important capabilities for the systems analyst to master. As such, they are considered project management fundamentals. A systems project begins with problems or with opportunities for improvement in a business that often come up as […]

Project Initiation (Project Management)

Systems projects are initiated by many different sources for many reasons. Some of the projects suggested will survive various stages of evaluation to be worked on by you (or you and your team); others will not and should not get that far. Businesspeople suggest systems projects for two broad reasons: because they experience problems that […]

Defining the Problem in Project Initiation (Project Management)

Whether using the classical SDLC or an object-oriented approach, the analyst first defines the problems and objectives of the system. These form the foundation of determining what needs to be accomplished by the system. Methods like Six Sigma (refer to Chapter 16 for details) start with a problem definition. A problem definition usually contains some […]

Selection of Projects

Projects come from many different sources and for many reasons. Not all should be selected for further study. You must be clear in your own mind about the reasons for recommending a systems study on a project that seems to address a problem or could bring about improvement. Consider the motivation that prompts a proposal […]

Feasibility Study – Determining Whether the Project is Feasible

Once the number of projects has been narrowed according to the criteria discussed previously, it is still necessary to determine if the selected projects are feasible. Our definition of feasibility goes much deeper than common usage of the term, because systems projects feasibility is assessed in three principal ways: operationally, technically, and economically. The feasibility […]