TABLE OF CONTENTS If you look at books on systems analysis and IT, you'll find little said about implementation and maintenance. Yet these are important activities. Implementation is where the rubber meets the road, so to speak. This is an area of high risk and peril. You could do all of the previous work with good quality, follow standards, and then discover that there are new issues at the end. Users are really going to resist change since the project that was over the horizon is now in their face.
User managers signed off on the requirements. Users participated in testing. They were trained. Now you are asking that they accept the system and place it into use. There are a number of political reasons why they refuse to take it.
The users have to change their process.
They do get paid more money for this extra work.
They have to change their exceptions.
The king and queen bees fear they will lose power.
The users are fearful of taking on the responsibility.
The users have done insufficient work to define the new process. How they would employ the system most effectively has not been fully worked out.
To make things worse, the user managers may not have strongly endorsed the new system.
If the users do not accept responsibility, what is IT going to do? How will IT respond? Often, they react in an inappropriate way. In a few cases, they may walk...
