What do customers think when they proposed a proposal to a developer to help their current business run efficiently, cost effective and operational improvement and help them on every strategic decission to make ? The answer is they always want a perfect system, less of bugs, easy to use and and dynamically can change it current business logic (if needed) as easy as button click.
This is a danger two sword side for a developer. On a side, to gain an industry-wide recognition of excelence and maintain current existency on a red zone of competition, this is a challange to take, and worth to be. But on, other side, this is sometimes or even commonly, can destroy current goal and make goodwill and existence that have been built for years lost caused by failure, if the strategy to build the system is on wrong direction.
There are 3 major conditions that show the current projects is on it’s way of failure.
- The project is not on budget (over budget)
- The project is not on time (over time)
- The project cannot meet customer needs.
The main factor that’s caused the 3 conditions above is no enough or less understanding of customers need, wrong calculation of project scope, and less of technology failure.
On Software development Life Cycle, Planning, Analysis and Design take the biggest share of project. It takes about 50% to 60% of project time schedule. And Just 30 % on Development phase and 10 % on Implementation and Transition Phase. The common mistake that make the project is on a way to it’s death is less understanding of this concept. Developer force itself to code without complete requirement document and understanding of customer needs, and finally this cause weak baseline and produce unpredictable bugs and unmanageable lot of change and make the time is up by this headeache things.
To avoid this condition, and have a strong competitive edge in a rapidly evolving marketplace, and to improve the ability to predict costs and revenues, and find ways to raise productivity and lower expenses, we should have a methodology to follow, and spread this concept all over organization.
In order to meet any of these objectives, we must have a clear understanding of what it takes to produce our products or services, complete with all document and documentation. To improve, we need to understand the variability in the processes of methodology that we follow, so that when we adjust them, we will know whether the adjustment is advantageous. In short, we will want to manage our business using accurate data about both products and processes.
This doesn’t guarantee to avoid failure, but reduce factors that cause failure. This also gives documented feedback for periodic evaluation to improve whole organization process. And also gives a quality of processes that guide to produce quality of products.
If we follow the guidance of methodology, at least we can reach ‘3 On’ goal of organization :
On Budget, On Time and On Direction.
To Keep our product has best quality, we have to ensure that our product, meet at least 3 McCall’s Quality Factor : Integrity, Maintainability, Flexibility on product revision, product transition and Correctness, Reliability, Usability and efficiency on product operation.
Finally, we have to remember that,
“ There is always no enough time to make a perfect system,”
“ But there is always enough time to make it Better and better and better”. (Eko K. Budiarjo)
“Technology just a tools, but without technology we are a fool”
For better Organization ………..
References:
Kusumah, A.Ahmad. Lecture notes at Magister Teknologi Informasi UI. 2009. Personal Notes. Copyright : Kusumah, A. Ahmad.