Planning the Software System Development

Projects to develop information systems (IS) at the custom software development company must be planned in advance. The systems are necessary to be identified, classified, ranked and selected for initial development, to improve or perhaps to eliminate. 

The question is: "What technologies will bring the most business benefits from the systems and applications?". Ideally, the decision to be followed should be based on business strategy, careful and methodical planning business strategy. The Business strategy can be determined by a variety of processes known as strategic planning, business modeling, business process reengineering, strategic linking, content management, etc. 

We do not intend to explain the differences between these approaches. It is enough to say that all these approaches are related to the study of the fundamental business processes in an organization whose purpose is to determine the long-term business vision and then assign priorities to various business problems that can be solved with the help of information technology (IT).

At the same time, there are many organizations - in particular, this applies to small organizations that do not have a distinct business strategy. Such organizations are likely to take a decision on the development of software system, simply identifying the most pressing business problems that require immediate solutions. If you change the external business environment and internal business conditions the existing software system should be modified again. While this approach has obvious shortcomings, it allows small organizations to move quickly in accordance with the current situation or benefit from the opportunity, or to repel new threats. 

Large organizations cannot afford a permanent change in the direction of doing business. In fact, they often dictate the activity of other organizations working in the same field of business, and to a certain extent can shape the environment for their daily needs.

However, large organizations should carefully look into the future and use of a planned approach to the selection of projects related to the development. As a rule, these are large-scale projects which require a lot of time to be implemented. They are too cumbersome to be easily modified or replaced, and should be easily adapted or directed towards future opportunities and threats. There are many ways of planning the development of systems. One traditional approach is called SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats). 

Another popular strategy is based on a model of VCM (Value Chain Model - model value chains). More recent versions of approaches to the development of business strategies known as BPR (Business Process Reengineering - BPR). 

Information necessary for the organization, as assessed using the so-called design templates for ISA (Information System Architecture – Architecture of Information Systems).

Similar design patterns can be obtained by analogy form the descriptive schemes  which have proven successful performance in the disciplines other than IT (e.g. in the construction industry). 

All approaches to the planning the custom software development have one common denominator - they are aimed at achieving more efficiency than productivity. The most rational solution to the wrong problem is not worth much!