Software Design and Development
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Stage 6 Software Design and Development
Scenario 2
John sees Narelle about developing a solution to best handle customer complaints. Narelle is very busy at the moment on another project, but catches up for a coffee with John and they quickly go over the requirements. Narelle thinks that her team will be pushed to provide the solution given their current workload, and suggests that John considers another approach. Could he simply employ more staff to provide the required attention? But John is adamant that he wants a computer-based solution, and Narelle knows that if she says they can't do it, it will look bad for her team.
Narelle knows that Sam, Robert, Liet and Colleen are all tied up on their current project, but sets up a meeting to discuss the Customer Complaints system. They are not happy that another project is being considered whilst they are fully committed to the current one. In particular, Liet says that if they spend the normal amount of time on estimating for this project, deadlines will slip. Narelle has a quick discussion with them about the new project, and they come to a quick conclusion that the project is not that difficult and should only take one month of their time. Narelle calculates this to be $30,000.
John is very happy with the cost and the timeline, and the business case is easily justified and approved.
Narelle's main problem at this time is with resources. With everyone heavily committed, it will be hard to deliver. Liet is also very concerned as it will need to be fitted into gaps in the other project. Even worse, Narelle has not explained to John that the one month of time is based on having the team fully available, not fitting it in around the current project, but the expectation of delivering it within a month has been set and John needs the system urgently.
Liet plans the project. This is difficult and the only way to fit it into the timeline is to reduce the time for the Business Requirements specification, and the Technical Design. At this stage, a number of requirements are discovered that weren't obvious from the brief discussions before the project was approved. The system is more complicated than first thought, and will take more effort to develop. Pressure is put on the coders to develop the models quickly. No one is happy about the fact that they are delivering less than their usual standard, but they don't have any option.
Despite everyone trying their best, the first cut of the code is delivered two weeks late. Narelle is under pressure from John, as the project should have been almost finished by now. Despite the need to finish the testing and bug-fixing, the system has several critical problems. It is obvious that some of the shortcuts taken by the developers are showing up as major problems, and the system runs too slowly as the Technical Design failed to identify that the database is quite extensive and will need some re-design to get the performance up to scratch. At this point, there is no time to do this, so the performance is noted as a problem to fix later. Despite there still being several bugs, further delays cannot be tolerated and Robert moves into the user acceptance testing phase.
User acceptance is a disaster. Not only does the system run very slowly customers do not like being asked to wait on the phone when they ring up to complain, but it is unreliable due to the reoccurring bugs. To make matters worse, the users complain that the system is cumbersome to use, and they would be happier with their existing paper-based system.
Outcome
This is crisis point for Narelle. John is very unhappy that the system is in such bad shape. It is now two months overdue, has cost three times the budget, and he feels that the system is unusable. He will not move the system into use if his staff say it will make things worse, not better. Narelle considers the options. Talking to her team, she asks for further estimates as to what it would take to fix the system. They are also upset that the system has failed, as they feel that it was an unfair reflection on the team. They do not want to take any shortcuts in the re-development, and they will only consider full resources to ensure that the project is successful. This will cost $50,000 and take two months. Nobody wants to risk making the situation even worse. However, John is not willing to spend the additional money on fixing the problems and the project is put on hold and never completed.
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