8.4 Under the subsection Program Risks, five examples are listed of conditions t

Question

8.4 Under the subsection Program Risks, five examples are listed of conditions

that may result in a signifi cant probability of program failure.

• A leading - edge unproven technology is to be applied.

• A major increase in performance is required.

• A major decrease in cost is required for the same performance.

• A signifi cantly more severe operating environment is postulated.

• An unduly short development schedule is imposed.

For each example, explain briefly what consequences of the condition may lead to a

program failure.

Explanation / Answer

1. A leading-edge unproven technology is to be applied

- While certain technologies are under research and development, some program managers are tech-savey and early adapters. This is a very high risk, as the new technologies are generally expensive. The program might depend on the funds that are not yet received. If the funding for these programs does not go through as expected, there can be a problem in applying leading-edge unproved technology.

- These technologies may have different standards in the market. The program may be implemented with 1 of the standards based on what is provided at the time of implementation and testing. However, when the full program is implemented, it may be needed to have other standards working as well. e.g. there are various RFID standards in the market and let us take an example of the project that is implemented with certain RFID reader at a leading distribution and retail chain. However when goods are received from top vendor in huge quantities that are following another RFID standard, the reader will fail for a huge quantity.

2. A major increase in performance is required.

-Let us take an example of hospital management where all the scanned copies of patients earlier reports are well organized. Whenever there is any decision to be taken about the major treatment, the doctor analyses the earlier records at his convenience and then comes up with the treatment plan.This has given amazing accuracy to the doctors in the treatments at this hospital.

Next the management decided to have the same system available, when the out-patient is visitng. The doctor has to get the analysis of the historical data while the patient is there for the consultation.

When this project is implemented, each doctor tries to fetch the historical data almost at the same time. The patient has to wait in front of the doctor for a longer time. The queue outside the consultation room builds up and some patients even need to come back the next day. The support staff are completely frustrated as well. This results in higher inefficiencies and bad reputation.

The IT team has given good results during testing, however when the program goes live, it can not handle multiple simultaneous requests at the same time.

The performance is linked some historical data, some scanned data of current documents that patient brings in etc. There is hardware speed involved with scanning, there are system performance issues when the hospital is fully working. Hence a major increase in performance can lead to program failure.

-A customized tool is able to give analysis for a small organization effectively. However, if the same tool is applied to a large organization with huge data over multiple locaitons without completely checking the design of the tool, it may just hang every time the managers try to run it. If the organization has grown rapidly, it may be a time to find new tools that do the same function for a larger data. A major increase in the performace may not be possible from this tool due its design limitations for a rapidly growing organization.

3. A major decrease in cost is required for the same performance.

Let us take an example where organization has its servers locally. The same application is moved without optimizing it for the web based interface. The applicaiton is moved out and there is a huge cost reduction as the local support for the maintenance is no longer needed. However the application was developed to work locally.

Every instruction takes a longer time to execute, the accounts staff (for example) is not able to complete the transaction entries.

In general the cloud-based applications or web applications or moving the servers to data centre can help reduce the costs in a great way. However it is very important to make sure that the applcations are written to work in that environment and not locally or only in LAN in client/server environment. If these applications are moved without proper considerations, then the program can easily fail.

4. A significantly more severe operating environment is postulated.

-The costs of a program may be done assuming it will work as implemented. Let us take an example where the airconditioning fails intermittently and this has impact on the parts of the hardware. The complete system is in warranty however when the technical support engineers inform that certain parts have failed and those need to be paid for, these could be expensive parts and the costs may not be planned.

-The mirror image of data may be implemented as a back up at a geographically far away locations, however if failure happen too often and if the recovery costs are too high the program can fail.

5. An unduly short development schedule is imposed.

-In this case the testing plan may not be elaborate. The testing may be done by the developers only. It is important to have testing done by the end users before implementing the system.

-The documentation may be rushed and when the users have to make data entry they can not find the required steps.

-The new system may not give some important reports that are needed and management may decide to bring back the old program.

-The user training is not done as there was not enough time and after the program implementation, the users still continue to work with the old manual methods.

These are the consequences of the conditions that lead to a program failure.

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