Objectives - Petrie's Electronics needs to improve its marketing and customer retention by increasing customer loyalty. The marketing department is in need of a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system. Upper management has selected No Customer Escapes as the top Information Technology project this year.
1. We have completed planning and selection, analysis, and design and are now ready to select an implementation method and prepare for operational use and maintenance of the system by completing all of the activities of the final phase of the system development life cycle (SDLC).
2. In order to implement our CRM system, we will need to document the system, train users, code and test the system, plan for operational support, and maintain the system.
3. We will answer the Petrie's Electronics Case Questions.
4. Project closedown brings the project to an end. A project can have a natural or unnatural termination. When a project terminates, several activities are performed including: (1) closing down the project; (2) conducting post-project reviews; and (3) closing the customer contract. When closing down the project, the project manager may assess each team member, provide career advice to team members, handle negative personnel issues, notify all interested parties that the project is completed, finalize documentation and financial records, and celebrate the accomplishments of the team. When conducting post-project reviews, the objective is to determine the strengths and weaknesses of project deliverables, the processes used to create them, and the project management process. Closing the customer contract ensures that all contractual terms have been met.
QUESTIONS:
1. Why don't information systems projects work out as planned? What causes the differences between the plan and reality?
2. Why is it important to document change requests? What happens if a development team doesn't?
3. When a project is late, do you think that adding more people to do the work helps or not? Justify your answer.
4. What is the role of a pilot project in information systems analysis? Why do you think the Petrie's team decided to do a pilot project before rolling out the customer loyalty system for everyone?
5. nformation systems development projects are said to fail if they are late, go over budget, or do not contain all of the functionality they were designed to have. Is the customer loyalty program a failure? Justify your answer. If not, how can failure be prevented? Is it important to avert failure? Why or why not?
problems and excercises-
1. Consider the reasons implementations fail. For at least three of these reasons, explain why this happens, if there is one (or more) type of implementation likely to minimize the occurrence, and if there is one (or more) type of installation more likely to induce failure for this reason
2. Two members of your project development team are disagreeing about the relative importance of training and documentation. Sam strongly believes that training is far more important because it will ensure the successful implementation of the information system and that the early usage is a positive experience. Pat encounters that the user documentation is far more important because its impact can help not only the current users, but also future users. Which do you think is right, and why?
3. Due to advances in technology and widespread computer literacy, many organizations use e-learning extensively to train employees. If you were managing a system implementation and had to train on a limited budget, you may find yourself choosing between e-learning or conducting face to face training with a subset of users who would then train their departments (called train the trainers). Which would you choose and why?
4. Is it good or bad for corporations to rely on vendors for computing support? List arguments both for and against reliance on vendors as part of your answer.