The Process of Identifying and Selecting IS Development Projects

Consist of three primary activities:

1. Identifying potential development projects
2. Classifying and ranking IS development projects
3. Selecting IS development projects
Identifying potential development projects.
Organizations vary as to how they identify projects.
This process can be performed by;

 A key member of top management, (a CEO of a small- or medium sized organization or a

senior executive in a larger organization).
 A steering committee, composed of a cross section of managers with an interest in systems;
 User departments, in which either the head of the requesting unit or a committee from the
requesting department decides which projects to submit (often you, as a systems analyst, will
help users prepare such requests); or
 The development group or a senior IS manager.

Notes: All methods of identification have found to have strengths and weaknesses. Other factors,
such as project cost, duration, complexity, and risk, are also influenced by the source of a given
project.
Example: selected by;
Top Management Projects

 Most often reflect the broader needs of the organization.

 They are likely to have a broader understanding of overall business objectives and
constraints.
 Referred as coming from a Top-down Source.

Functional Manager Projects

 Designed for a particular business need within a given business unit. (these projects may not
reflect the overall objectives of the organization).
 These projects may not consider broader organizational issues.
 They are generally referred to as coming from a bottom-up source.

Classifying and ranking IS development projects.

 This process is conducted to assess (to judge or decide the amount, value, quality or
importance of something) the relative merit of potential projects.
 classifying and ranking projects can be performed by top managers, a steering committee,
business units, or the IS development group.
 Additionally, the criteria used when assigning the relative merit of a given project can vary.

Selecting IS development projects

 Project selection is a process of considering both short- and long-term projects and selecting
those most likely to achieve business objectives.
 Business conditions change over time, the relative importance of any single project may
greatly change.
 Thus, the identification and selection of projects is a very important and ongoing activity.

The IS project selection

Numerous factors must be considered when making project selection decisions.
selection decision requires that the perceived needs of the organization, existing systems and
ongoing projects, resource availability, evaluation criteria, current business conditions, and the
perspectives of the decision makers will all play a role in project selection decisions.

 Numerous outcomes can occur from this decision process; projects can be accepted or
rejected.
1. Acceptance of a project usually means that funding to conduct the next phase of the SDLC
has been approved.
2. Rejection means that the project will no longer be considered for development.
3. Conditionally accepted; they may be accepted pending the approval or availability of
needed resources or the demonstration that a particularly difficult aspect of the system can
be developed.
4. Returned to the original requesters, who are told to develop or purchase the requested
system.
5. Finally, the requesters of a project may be asked to modify and resubmit their request after
making suggested changes or clarifications.
Example of Project Selection Criteria refer pg.12 figure 4-4
One method for deciding among different projects, or when considering alternative designs for a
given system.
For example, suppose that, for a given system that has been identified and selected, there are
three alternative designs that could be pursued—A, B, or C.
Let’s also suppose that early planning meetings identified three key system requirements and
four key constraints that could be used to help make a decision on which alternative to pursue.
In the left column of Figure three system requirements and four constraints are listed.
Because not all requirements and constraints are of equal importance, they are weighted based on
their relative importance.
In other words, you do not have to weight requirements and constraints equally; it is certainly
possible to make requirements more or less important than constraints.
Deliverables and outcomes:
The primary deliverable from the first part of the planning phase is a schedule of specific IS
development projects, coming from both top-down and bottom-up sources, (to move into the
next part of the planning phase—project initiation and planning).
An outcome of this phase is the assurance that careful consideration was given to project
selection, with a clear understanding of how each project can help the organization reach its
objectives.
After each subsequent SDLC phase, you, other members of the project team, and organizational
officials will re-assess your project to determine whether the business conditions have
changed or whether a more detailed understanding of a system’s costs, benefits, and risks
would suggest that the project is not as worthy as previously thought.
This means that a clear understanding of the business and the desired role of information systems
in achieving organizational goals is a precondition to improving the identification and selection
process.
Corporate and Information Systems Planning

 Organizations have not traditionally used a systematic planning process when determining
how to allocate IS resources.
 Instead, projects have often resulted from attempts to solve isolated organizational problems.
 In effect, organizations have asked the question: “What procedure (application program) is
required to solve this particular problem as it exists today?”
The difficulty with this approach is that the required organizational procedures are likely to
change over time as the environment changes.
For example: a company may decide to change its method of billing customers or a university
may change its procedure for registering students. When such changes occur, it is usually
necessary to again modify existing information systems.
Planning-based approaches essentially ask the question: “What information (or data)
requirements will satisfy the decision-making needs or business processes of the enterprise today
and well into the future?”

 A major advantage of this approach is that an organization’s informational needs are less
likely to change (or will change more slowly) than its business processes.
 unless an organization fundamentally changes its business, its underlying data structures may
remain reasonably stable for more than 10 years.
Corporate Strategic Planning
A prerequisite for making effective project selection decisions to gain a clear idea of where an
organization is, its vision of where it wants to be in the future, and how to make the transition to
its desired future state.

The three-step process.

In Step 1: Focuses on gaining an understanding of the current enterprise. In other words, if you
don’t know where you are, it is impossible to tell where you are going.
In Step 2: Top management must determine where it wants the enterprise to be in the future.
In Step 3: After gaining an understanding of the current and future enterprise, a strategic plan
can be developed to guide this transition.
During corporate strategic planning, executives typically develop a mission statement, statements
of future corporate objectives, and strategies designed to help the organization reach its
objectives.
Refer to pg.19, 20,21. For a sample Mission, Objective case study of the Pine Valley Furniture.
Information Systems Planning
The second planning process that can play a significant role in the quality of project
identification and selection decisions is called information systems planning (ISP).
Why ISP? ISP is an orderly means of assessing the information needs of an organization and
defining the information systems, databases, and technologies that will best satisfy those needs.
This means that during ISP you (or, more likely, senior IS managers responsible for the IS plan)
must model current and future organization informational needs and develop strategies and
project plans to migrate the current information systems and technologies to their desired future
state. ISP is a top-down process.
The three steps are:
Step1: - is to assess current IS-related assets—human resources, data, processes, and
technologies.
Step 2: - target blueprints of these resources are developed. These blueprints reflect the desired
future state of resources needed by the organization to reach its objectives as defined during
strategic planning.
Step 3: - a series of scheduled projects is defined to help move the organization from its current
to its future desired state. (Of course, scheduled projects from the ISP process are just one source
for projects.
1. Describe the current situation.
Top-down planning attempts to gain a broad understanding of the informational needs of the
entire organization.
The approach begins by conducting an extensive analysis of the organization’s mission,
objectives, and strategy and determining the information requirements needed to meet each
objective.
bottom-up planning approach requires the identification of business problems and opportunities
that are used to define projects.
Using the bottom-up approach for creating IS plans can be faster and less costly than using the
top-down approach; it also has the advantage of identifying pressing organizational problems.
2. Describing the target situation, trends, and constraints
After describing the current situation,
The next step in the ISP (information system planning) process is to define the target situation
that reflects the desired future state of the organization.
This means that the target situation consists of the desired state of the locations, units, functions,
processes, data, and IS.
3. Developing a transition strategy and plans
Once the creation of the current and target situations is complete, a detailed transition strategy
and plan are developed by the IS planning team.
This plan should be very comprehensive, reflecting broad, long-range issues in addition to
providing sufficient detail to guide all levels of management concerning what needs to be done,
how, when, and by whom in the organization.