Managing the Systems Development Life Cycle:Develop a Strategic Systems Plan

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Develop a Strategic Systems Plan

After collecting and documenting input from the business plan, legacy issues, and user feedback, members of the steering committee and systems professionals evaluate the pros and cons of each proposal. This involves assessing each potential project’s benefits, costs, and strategic implications to the organization. Development will proceed on proposals that show the greatest potential for supporting the organization’s business objectives at the lowest cost. Figure 13-3 shows how the merits of competing projects may be presented to provide a sense of relative scale. The vertical dimension shows project priority in terms of organizational need. The horizontal plane shows the expected costs of each project, and the size of the circle reflects the projects’ strategic impact. For example, an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system is a high- priority project of great strategic importance. Such a project would, however, be extremely costly. On the other hand, the human resources project is of strategic importance also, but at a much lower cost.

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