CIS 500 Student Response

"Project Management and SDLC" Please respond to the following:

The purpose of project management and the SDLC is to increase successful software implementation. The article titled “IT Project Failure Rates: Facts and Reasons” makes it clear that a lot of projects still fail.

Identify an IT system development failure that occurred within the last 2 years. Do not repeat an example from earlier in the course or one that has been posted by another student.

British Airways experienced several IT system development failures within the last two years, in this discussion I will focus on the system failure that occurred in 2017. British Airways seemed to be plagued with many issues ranging from data breaches, customer service issues, and ongoing IT project issues within their organization. In 2017, a massive system failure resulted in scheduled flights being cancelled or delayed. leaving thousands of passengers stranded at airports around the globe. The system outage also affected all of the call centers and websites, many passengers remained confused, worried and outraged as there were no updates, explanations or reasons given to explain the system failure. The problems were due to a computer glitch in the system; however, union members blamed the computer outage on the outsourcing of IT jobs to India in 2016, reports indicate the outage could have been avoided if the outsourcing had not occurred.

In your initial post this week, analyze which project management concepts were not respected by the project managers and where in the SDLC these lapses occurred.

“The planning stage is the first and most critical phase of any systems development effort” (Baltzan, 2019). The project manager should have developed a more strategic alliance with the other organization since it was known fact that IT staff was redundant and already being outsourced in 2016. There are so many challenges to outsourcing and those that make such decisions and oversee the project should have alternative plans in place to avoid costly mistakes down the road. The implementation phase is also very critical, and I think project management concepts were not respected by the project managers in this case. In this phase “user documentation is created that highlights how to use the system and how to troubleshoot issues or problems.” (Baltzan, 2019). Many reports also surfaced that the system glitch was simply caused by human error, an engineer accidently switched the power on and off, due to his lack of training. The SDLC lapse occurred due to not having a plan to switch to an alternative method due to the mistake made by human error.

Describe how you might have spoken up had you been on the steering committee.

Being a member of the steering committee would have allowed me to strongly voice my opinion on why decisions were made to outsource the entire IT department in the first place. I would have offered other suggestions on ways the company could have saved money other than scaling back on computer support within the organization. I would have been an advocate for in-sourcing (in-house development) to develop and maintain our information technology systems. I would have been open to outsourcing, if the decisions were based solely on the benefits of outsourcing projects, and not greed as it was the primary reason in my example provided.

References:

Baltzan, P. (2019). Information systems. New York: McGraw-Hill.

British Airways: Thousands disrupted as flights axed amid IT crash. (2017, May 27). Retrieved from https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-40069865