TABLE OF CONTENTS Now I appreciate that many of you may have reacted with some shock to my six value-adding CSFs . Maybe you are saying, But what about optimizing systems requirements specification? What about optimizing system design? What about optimizing testing? What, for goodness sake, about optimizing quality management? Look, if you were right I would be the first to agree with you. Sorry, but these systems development management practices simply do not make the cut when the key criterion is business value-adding. With the arguable exclusion of rapid application development (RAD) best practices, systems development management best practices are principally about increasing the predictability of systems delivery, increasing the reliability of the delivered system and reducing post-implementation maintenance and support costs. It is secondarily about improving the functional quality of the system delivered. And it will almost certainly cost more and take longer to deliver systems using these practices. This is not my idea of high value-adding , at least not relative to the CSFs I have set out. Please understand that I am not (entirely) attacking the waterfall approach of conventional structured systems development methods per se. If you are developing a huge, complex, interdependent suite of systems of the likes of SAP or Peoplesoft then you are going to need this level of structure and formality. On the other hand, if you are developing a huge, complex, interdependent suite of systems of the likes of SAP or People-soft, why aren t you buying SAP or Peoplesoft (or...
