Among the reasons cited for failure were inadequate planning, poor scope management and poor communication between the IT function and the business. .
Information System Development Approaches.
In the continuing effort to improve the systems analysis and design process, several different approaches have been developed. The waterfall model and the SSADM will be discussed in brief, followed by more detailed information on Joint Application Design (JAD), Prototyping and Rapid Application Development (RAD).
The Waterfall model formally also known as System Development Life Cycle (SDLC) Was much beloved in the early days of software engineering and still dominates some government procurement projects' (Neilsen, 2001). .
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Waterfall model adopted from (www.cogs.susx.ac.uk/./se/Slides/ process/process-1.html). For more information on the development stages incorporated in the waterfall model refer to; Systems Analysis and Design (Yeates, et al. 1994:379-394.).
Each activity in the Waterfall model represents as separate process phases. After each stage is defined it is signed off' and development goes on to the following stage. There are several drawbacks to the Waterfall model approach to system development. These are, the process is time-consuming, costly and requires extensive documentation (specs) for each phase. It is often difficult for the customer to state all requirements explicitly at the start of the development lifecycle. With this approach, the customer must be patient, due to a working version is not usually available until late in the development lifecycle. Consequently, the systems development process proceeds to completion with little or no user involvement until the final system is presented to the user. This approach are not useful for an information system development within a Human Resource Department as it is prone to be too slow to react to external business changes, sequential and inflexible to deal with change, often fails to deliver business requirements and system user needs etc.