Quiz 2 Flashcards
Elements of Project Planning
- describing the project scope, alternatives, and feasibility
- dividing the project into manageable tasks
- estimating resources and creating a resource plan
- developing a preliminary schedule
- developing a communication plan
- determining project standards and procedures
- identifying and assessing risk
- creating a preliminary budget
- developing project scope statement
- setting a baseline project plan
Baseline project plan
a major outcome and deliverable from the project initiation and planning phase that contains the best estimate of a project’s scope, benefits, costs, risks, and resource requirements
Categories of feasibility and their definitions
Economic: a process of identifying the financial benefits and costs associated with a development project
Technical: a process of assessing the development organization’s ability to construct a proposed system
Operational: the process of assessing the degree to which a proposed system solves business problems or takes advantage of business opportunities
Scheduling: the process of assessing the degree to which the potential time frame and completion dates for all major activities within a project meet organizational deadlines and constraints for affecting change
Legal and Contractual: the process of assessing potential legal and contractual ramifications due to the construction of a system
Political: the process of evaluating how key stakeholders within the organization view the proposed system
Tangible Benefit
A benefit derived from the creation of an information system that can be measured in dollars and with certainty
Examples of tangible benefits
o Cost reduction and avoidance
o Error reduction
o Increased flexibility
o Increased speed of activity
o Improvement of management planning and control
o Opening new markets and increasing sales opportunities
Intangible Benefit
a benefit derived from the creation of an information system that cannot be easily measured in dollars or with certainty
Examples of intangible benefits
o Improvement of employee morale
o broader societal implications
tangible cost
a cost associated with an information system that can be measured in dollars with certainty
Examples of tangible cost
o Hardware costs
o Labor costs
o Operational costs (employee training and building renovations
Intangible Cost
a cost associated with an information system that cannot be easily measured in terms of dollars or with certainty
Examples of intangible cost
o Loss of customer goodwill
o Employee morale
o Operational inefficiency
one-time cost
a cost associated with project start-up and development or system start-up
Examples of One-time cost
o Systems development
o New hardware and software purchases
o User training
o Site preparation
o Data or system conversion
Recurring Cost
a cost resulting from the ongoing evolution and use of a system
Examples of recurring costs
o Application software maintenance
o Incremental data storage expenses
o Incremental communications
o New software and hardware leases
o Supplies and other expenses
Cost-benefit analysis
a decision-making tool used to compare the costs and benefits of a particular action, project, or decision. It helps determine whether the benefits outweigh the costs and by how much
Methods of Cost-benefit analysis and their definitions
o Net Present value (NPV): uses a discount rate determined from the company’s cost of capital to establish the present value of a project. Used to determine the present value of both cash receipts and outlays
o Return on Investment (ROI): ratio of the net cash receipts of the project divided by the cash outlays of the project. Trade-off analysis can be made among projects competing for investment by comparing their representative ROI ratios
o Break-even Analysis (BEA): finds the amount of time required for the cumulative cash flow from a project to equal its initial and ongoing investment
Included in the baseline project plan
- introduction
- system description
- feasibility assessment
- management issues
Ways to gather information from users for the system
- interviewing and listening
- directly observing users
- analyzing procedures and other documents
- JAD
- questionnaires
JAD session
conducted at a location other than the place where the people involved normally work to keep participants away from as many distractions as possible so that they can concentrate on systems analysis
Prototyping
an iterative process of systems development in which requirements are converted to a working system that is continually revised through close collaboration between an analyst and users
Pros of Prototyping
User requirements are not clear or well understood
One or a few users and other stakeholders are involved with the system
Possible designs are complex and require concrete form to fully evaluate
Communication problems have existed in the past between users and analysts
Tools and data are readily available to rapidly build working systems
Cons of Prototyping
Prototypes have a tendency to avoid creating formal documentation of system requirements
Prototypes can become very idiosyncratic to the initial user and difficult to diffuse or adapt to other potential users
Prototypes are often built as stand-alone systems, thus ignoring issues of sharing data and interactions with other existing systems
Checks in the SDLC are bypassed so that some more subtle, but still important, system requirements might be forgotten
Business Process Reengineering
the search for, and implementation of, radical change in business processes to achieve breakthrough improvements in products and services
