system analysis and design.

Barbara Singleton, manager of western regional sales at the WAMAP Company, requested that the IS department develop a sales force management and tracking system that would enable her to better monitor the performance of her sales sta?.

Unfortunately, due to the massive backlog of work facing the IS department, her request was given a low priority. After 6 months of inaction by the IS department, Barbara decided to take matters into her own hands.

Following the advice of friends, Barbara purchased a PC and simple database software and constructed a sales force management and tracking system on her own.

Although Barbara's system has been "completed" for about 6 weeks, it still has many features that do not work correctly, and some functions are full of errors. Barbara's assistant is so mistrustful of the system that she has secretly gone back to using her old paper-based system, since it is much more reliable.

Over dinner one evening, Barbara complained to a systems analyst friend, "I don't know what went wrong with this project. It seemed pretty simple to me. Those IS guys wanted me to follow this elaborate set of steps and tasks, but I didn't think all that really applied to a PC-based system. I just thought I could build this system and tweak it around until I got what I wanted without all the fuss and bother of the methodology the IS guys were pushing. I mean, doesn't that just apply to their big, expensive systems?"

Assuming that you are Barbara's systems analyst friend, how would you respond to her complaint?