With limited management resources available and the pressure to deploy new business
solutions quickly, measuring productivity in systems development often becomes a low priority
for many organizations. it departments at smaller companies in particular seem reluctant to
institute policies to track the performance of development projects. some companies,
however, have been forced to adopt productivity measurement methods, and are reaping
rewards for doing so. for example, national retailer belk inc. had to adopt productivity metrics
as a means of reducing devastating system failures. aubrey, the veteran it consultant that
belk hired, was used to nursing client organisations through crashes that periodically downed
their systems. but nothing had prepared aubrey for the failure rate at belk. soon after joining
the company as senior vp for systems development, aubrey discovered that belk’s batch
systems went down an astounding 800 times a month. the charlotte, north carolina, outfit, a
private company with estimated annual revenue of $1.7 billion, paid a heavy price for the
constant bandaging: in 1997, belk spent $1.1 million of its $30 million it budget on unplanned
maintenance. to steady the systems, aubrey instituted a series of tracking measures.
programmers began logging their time. required software functions were carefully counted in
application development projects. belk compared its cycle time, defect rates, and productivity
with competitors’ figures. and systems managers were required to draw up blueprints for
reducing the crashes—with the results reviewed in their performance evaluations. the
transition to tracking the it department’s performance was painful but worthwhile. belk’s
systems became more stable—monthly disruptions dropped to 480 incidents, a figure aubrey
hopes to slash by another 30 percent. unplanned maintenance costs also have been brought
under control, with initial cuts in unplanned maintenance expenses of $800,000.
discuss the basic steps in the traditional systems development life cycle?