[solved]-Limited Management Resources Available Pressure Deploy New Business Solutions Quickly Meas Q39679757

With limited management resources available and thepressure to deploy new business
solutions quickly, measuring productivity in systems developmentoften becomes a low priority
for many organizations. IT departments at smaller companies inparticular seem reluctant to
institute policies to track the performance of developmentprojects. Some companies,
however, have been forced to adopt productivity measurementmethods, and are reaping
rewards for doing so. For example, national retailer Belk Inc. hadto adopt productivity metrics
as a means of reducing devastating system failures. Aubrey, theveteran IT consultant that
Belk hired, was used to nursing client organisations throughcrashes that periodically downed
their systems. But nothing had prepared Aubrey for the failure rateat Belk. Soon after joining
the company as senior VP for systems development, Aubrey discoveredthat Belk’s batch
systems went down an astounding 800 times a month. The Charlotte,North Carolina, outfit, a
private company with estimated annual revenue of $1.7 billion, paida heavy price for the
constant bandaging: In 1997, Belk spent $1.1 million of its $30million IT budget on unplanned
maintenance. To steady the systems, Aubrey instituted a series oftracking measures.
Programmers began logging their time. Required software functionswere carefully counted in
application development projects. Belk compared its cycle time,defect rates, and productivity
with competitors’ figures. And systems managers were required todraw up blueprints for
reducing the crashes—with the results reviewed in their performanceevaluations. The
transition to tracking the IT department’s performance was painfulbut worthwhile. Belk’s
systems became more stable—monthly disruptions dropped to 480incidents, a figure Aubrey hopes to slash by another 30 percent.Unplanned maintenance costs also have been brought
under control, with initial cuts in unplanned maintenance expensesof $800,000.
Discuss the basic steps in the traditional systems development lifecycle?

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