A case study of a Technology Project.
The Project to be studied is an implementation of a work assignment and tracking system in an IT department in a large company in North America. The IT Department before the project was started, had undergone a management change and a reorganization due to corporate cost cutting and restructuring during the economic downturn of the past three years which was started during the last year of the Clinton administration. .
The previous structure of the IT organization was teams of people that support specific applications in the system, and the business users of a particular application contacted the team assigned to their application for system enhancements and support. There was no system for managing and tracking projects and tasks, and it was left to the managers of each team to handle their project prioritization, assignment and tracking. This structure was changed to a pooled resource structure where IT staff people were grouped by functional areas (such as mainframe support group, pc support group, web applications, etc). The IT structure was no longer hierarchical and the work was no longer handed down in a top down approach thus creating a need for a new procedure and new way of managing people and tasks to function effectively.
Analyzing the Initiation.
The initiation of a system (or project) begins when a business need or opportunity is identified. This happened for this project when a new CIO was appointed to head the new IT organization and was asked again to reduce head count by pooling the resources while at the same time still provide timely and effective service to the business users of the IT systems and applications.
Analyzing the System Concept Development Phase.
In this phase of SDLC, the business need has been approved and the approaches for accomplishing the concept are reviewed for feasibility and appropriateness. Several approaches were considered for tackling the problem in the IT department.