On Time Technology Implementation: How to Achieve Implementation Success with Limited Time and Resources

Rating:
Summary: Excellent coverage of system implementation
Review: Covers software development, implementation of software packages, and knowledge management. A basic theme of the book is to relate the system to the business processes. There are many useful detailed lessons learned. We have found a number of these to be valuable in my department. The same applies to the checklists. There are two sections of each chapter that are also good. These are what can go wrong and how to speed up the implementation. The book is more in tune with the real situation that you find in IT with limited resources and time. The book also gives recognition to the fact that legacy systems will be around for a long time. Many other books assume that these can be replaced or ignored. We spend over half of our programmer time on legacy systems maintenance so that allocating the rest of their time is a major concern-which this book addresses. Another good idea is that in software package evaluation, you do not focus on software features, but instead on what capabilities the packages are lacking. We used this idea to select different accounting software than if we had used features. The book is easy to read and can be used by non technical people. Several of our business managers have found it informative. In the next version of this book, the authors should expand their guidelines.

Rating:
Summary: Very interesting book
Review: This book focuses on guidelines to implement software with the emphasis on time. It deals with software development, packages, and knowledge management as well as maintenance and enhancement. The book does not preach a specific method, but instead provides common sense guidelines for both users and system professionals. A useful chapter is the last one which discusses how to deal with a number of problems that you are likely to encounter. This was very valuable to my group. Some of these issues are top management commitment, managing multiple vendors, dealing with user expectations, handling changing requirements and creeping scope just to mention a few. The focus of the book is on systems rather than technology in general. There is a good chapter on outsourcing. The life cycle that is presented begins with assessing the current business process, defining the new process, and then deriving requirements and benefits from a comparison of the two. This is an improvement over the standard approach of interviewing and gathering requirements from a system rather than a process perspective. The book should be expanded with more guidelines, but is good as is.