System Development Success

Technology has come a long way in the past twenty years and has created many opportunities for organizations. It is part of the organizational culture to implement change and keep up with technology in order to keep a competitive advantage. Organizations want clean processes that help increase production and decrease cost. Some companies will hire a software manager or outsource to a company to build such systems/software to help with these goals of higher production and lower costs. Across all industries many systems and software have done just that and continue to help reach these goals, that seemed impossible even ten years ago. However, it is not as simple as getting a software program that meets the needs of the business and the customer (end users). There is a lot that goes into the development of such a project, time, money, human resources, and a lot of research. In order for a software developer to build a program that will be beneficial for the company there has to be open communication. Without the help of management, the developers have no idea what is needed to satisfy the business need and the customers need. It is not enough to broadly explain what you want a program to do.

Article Summaries

Andres and Zmud conducted a research on project manager’s productivity and the variables that increase such results. The area of this study was based on software development and the role of the project manager. They came up with six hypotheses to test. The variables that were tested were task interdependence, coordination strategy, and goal conflict. In the hypothesis, Andres and Zmud mixed the variables to find which combination yielded higher productivity in software development. There stand was to prove that classical software project management methodologies are outdated and when entering such projects characteristics like coordination, conflict and interdependence play a huge role in the outcome. Project managers need to be able to pick a...