Week 6_Petrie's Electronics Cases Closeout_ESSAY

1. There are many reasons that cause the difference between information system plans and the reality. To begin with, lack of understanding the user needs leads to failure of the whole project. Success of any project is usually governed by the scope of the project and the main objective underlying formulation of the project. When the management fails to understand the scope then the project is always doomed to fail. Secondly, failure to have management continuity and a system of incentives that helps to motivate overly optimistic estimates the upbeat and advantages gained from the project. Moreover, a poor alignment between the end users and the information systems department leads to failure of many projects in the end. This is because the IT departments is usually responsible for provision of information to all other people in the management of the project. Some of the other factors that lead to lack of achievement of success in information systems projects in lack of user involvement, poor planning of the project, unrealistic expectations from the project and lack of executive management support.

2. Change requests within a project should always be documented. The administrators of databases and IT controllers support different business units that have different requirements. Documenting and formalizing any of the changes in the business units helps to prevent cases of miscommunication that can occur between the database administration and the application development areas. Consequently, documenting of the changes is essential for even remote database service providers. This means that if your business does not have any formal change request process it should be initiated. In the market today, there are a thousand and other many source coding version tools and change management tools that can be used. If the development team does not not create a change within an organization, this poses a threat to the success of the project in the end. For instance, the failure to have change requests in the aforementioned Petrie’s case led to increase in the costs of operation.

3. Adding people to the project when it is running out of time does not help in the completion of the project. When a project is running out of time, the current team does not have quality team to introduce new people about the requirements of the actual project. This makes the project a lose-lose situation for the new people and the current management team for the project. This means that the team misses from the actual development of the project. The new people who come to the project do not contribute positively to the project as they prevent the current team from achieving their desired success. Addition of more people also pushes the budget expenditure more than the expected budget expenditure thus preventing positive achievement of project success.

4. Pilot projects in information system analysis help to equip the current team with the ability to share the available resources and provide the management team with knowledge and information on resource sharing. This helps the current project team with information that is required in making decisions in the larger projects. Having a collective structuring of the knowledge helps to empower project team with the ability of making logical decisions that will help to improve the achievement of success in a project. Consequently, Petrie’s team decided to have a pilot project before rolling out to the customer’s loyalty system in order to test the users and their use of the real project. This was beneficial to the project leaders because they had adequate time to search for issues that would lead to failure of the loyalty system. Furthermore, the team wanted to investigate the areas of success in the project. This would help them to concentrate their efforts in improving success.

5. Information system development projects are said to fail when they are late, they do not contain all the functionality or even when they go over their budgets. Consequently, customer loyalty program is a failure since it has run out of time. However, the failure of the project could be prevented in many ways. To begin with, the management needs to involve all its users in the project. Secondly, there should be proper planning, which is accompanied with complete specifications and leveling of all resources available for the project. The project team should also set aside realistic expectations aimed at achievement of success within the project. This means that chances of failure and running out of time should also be put under consideration. The requirements of the project should not be changed since any change within an information systems project often leads to a failure of the whole project.