Planning methodologies for IT projects.

Essay by PavvUniversity, Master'sC+, April 2003

download word file, 7 pages 3.3

Planning in general

In order to reach targeted project goals and objectives, project planning is vital to ensure project completion. Gill (2002) states that projects that fail to succeed often suffer from low quality and missed deadline and stress that these problem areas derive from poor planning. In software development projects, programmers have little chance of succeeding when working without a plan. A realistic plan helps visualising and documenting what is needed and expected from the project team, along with providing schedules and. If the project runs into trouble meeting schedules and budgets, management and project teams often blame it on poor planning.

Whittaker (1999) in her article supports this view in referring to a survey of IT project processes that presented poor planning and bad risk management as critical factors for a project's success or failure. Planning can therefore be considered to be one of the fundaments in project management and is an area that needs great awareness.

Planning Methodologies

Many frameworks for system development have been outlined in order to provide a structure for how to develop a good and organised plan for a software development project and to control and monitor user participation (Czerepak, 2002). Utilising available methodologies facilitates the business in several ways. Methodologies provide a firm framework that ensures that all tasks within the planning process are performed in the same way time and time again, which again makes it easier to measure performance and discover improvement opportunities. Methodologies also ensure that cost-effective, quality systems are developed which address an organisation's business needs.

Most system methodologies used today have evolved from three primary approaches:

·Ad hoc development

·Waterfall model

·Iterative process

Another general separation between methodologies is hard and soft paradigms. Soft paradigms focus more on human factors involved in system development, whilst hard paradigms...