A Guide to Developing Projects On High Demand Systems

I have seen it; systems administrators that are too afraid to make changes to an environment for fear of losing their jobs, especially for high demand systems, such as ISP's who have guaranteed levels of uptime. I am presenting you a plan that can be adopted for mid level organizations and modified for smaller businesses or large enterprise level systems. The only real difference between these plans for different size systems/organizations is the number of sign offs that each document needs to pass. This system is based on ISO 9000, SDLC, and other established standards and is not for everyone, although if you are a small business you should aspire to meet as many of these requirements as possible with the safe assumption that your organization will grow. This is geared toward software development although it can be slightly modified to fit projects where software is merely selected, bought off the shelf, and installed.

:: Phase 1 :: Phase 2 :: Phase 3 ::

PHASE 1 Project Identification, Generation, Justification, Feasibility, and Constraints.

Quality policies need to be defined, documented, understood, implemented and maintained. Plan a JAD session or some other meeting to discuss what can be done to improve business processes. Develop a document that records ideas, goals, and preferences that are fact based. This will form your Vision Document. You vision document at minimum needs to contain the following:

• Scope, Objectives, and Summary of document
• Business Opportunity
• Summary of features
• Summary of benefits
• Purpose of project
• Project Justification
• Feasibility of project
• Summary of features
• Summary of operating environment
• Capacity and performance requirements
• Constraints
• Desired Quality Ranges
• Applicable managerial standards
• Required Feature and Project Outcome Attributes
• Cost Estimation
• Channel and Timeline of Funding

It is also required that you maintain documented Stakeholder Needs which will at minimum contain:

• Scope, Objectives, and Summary of document
• List of stakeholders
• List of stakeholders roles in project
• Overview of the project with regards to Stakeholders
• Functionality
• Reliability
• Performance
• Supportability
• Business and Regulations
• Technology Rules and limitations

Contact stakeholders regularly to inform them of final changes you want to be made. Verify that they agree with these changes throughout this entire process when they are affected to reduce delays. In addition management staff should have an additional set of employee, resource procurement, and other restrictive policies in place such as reporting guidelines of current project status. Incoming contracts (and purchase orders) shall be reviewed carefully to determine whether they meet the minimum requirements defined adequately. The design project shall be planned, with documented input and output parameters which are critical success factors. Design outputs shall be verified with controlled changes with accompanying justification to meet input requirements. All of this information shall be recorded within a Project Plan which shall contain at minimum:

• Scope, Objectives, and Summary of document
• Summary of features
• Summary of benefits
• Business Opportunity
• Problem Statement
• Project Product Positioning Statement
• User description, environment, needs, alternatives
• Project perspective
• Assumptions of: infrastructure, user overload, updates
• Cost and estimated usage
• Installation
• Licensing
• Product Features
• Constraints
• Define quality ranges of acceptable use
• User manual, technical manual, and other stakeholder support
• Labeling and packaging

All documents must be controlled by an established procedure (such as a CVS), and by established policy (to maintain document permissions). This documentation shall be updated with during the project to reflect the current aspects of the project.

PHASE 2 Further Analysis and Project Development

Potential subcontractors and sub-suppliers must be evaluated for their ability to provide stated requirements which are to be clearly defined in contracting data. This data will be carefully documented, and noted within the project plan. Performance of each subcontractor's quality assurance system must be established before contracts can be finalized. In addition You are to gather research to justify the selection of each sub-contractor or in-house resource utilized in the design. Purchasing of resources may proceed once justification and analyzation of all sub-contractors and suppliers is final.

All supplies and products need to be identified and traceable by item, contributor, and production run throughout all stages of project including implementation in phase 3. Process Control shall be exercised during Production (and installation). This is to be carried out under controlled conditions based upon documented instructions previously written. Use of in-process controls which was previously established shall be the cornerstone of criteria for workmanship approval. Any processes that cannot be verified after unit/module production needs to be monitored and controlled throughout the rest of the project.

The following documentation needs to be produced and finalized during Phase 2. If any module which was previously tested is dependant on the performance of another module/unit, the critical module must meet specifications. If a module/unit falls below specification, all dependent units/modules must be retested under the lower specification that is feasibly produced. Produce an early prototypes representing modules/units of the entire project to reduce risk where feasible. Use methods such as synchronize and stabilize to overcome scope creep while tackling critical success factors. Frequent design reviews and strategy sessions are critical to success.

Generate Test Plans for each involved process:

• Scope, Objectives, and Summary of document
• Requirements
• Strategy
• User Interface
• Performance
• Business Cycle
• System Integration
• Data Integrity
• Specifications
• Resources Required
• User Acceptance
• Unit Test
• Monitoring Methodologies
• Error Reporting Methodologies
• Check list

Generate Use Cases for each involved process

• Scope, Objectives, and Summary of document
• Business Context
• Define established roles
• Define planned flow
• Define alternate flows
• Define Exception Flows
• Define Special requirements
• Preconditions Required
• Post conditions
• Diagram and models

Generate an Implementation Plan (roll-out Plan)

• Scope, Objectives, and Summary of document
• Document a script for implementation
• Establish Responsibilities
• Develop Organizational Policy
• Provide Training
• Promote Organizational Awareness
• Monitor Process performances based on new project inclusion
• Statistical methods and formulas which are to be used are to be defined
• Document possible problems, and a contingency plan for dealing with each
• Implementation Schedule
• Internal Audit schedule

PHASE 3 Testing, Rollout, Monitoring, and Maintaince.

All Equipment used to demonstrate conformance is to be controlled, calibrated, documented and maintained. Documentation should include a checklist to control and identify measurements to be made, affected instruments to be modified and calibrated using tested processes and status indicators. All calibrations and measurements must be retested to check the validity of any equipment used, using documentation as a baseline. In addition environmental conditions must be checked to make sure they meet specifications.

All modules/units are to undergo the following.

1. Unit testing of the lowest level modules that have no dependent modules
2. Perform all scripted testing
3. Implement the system on the test environment
4. Stress-test the project within the test environment
5. Train users according to roll out plan
6. Implement the project on the Fail over system
7. Implement the project on the production system
8. Monitor the project

Any failure of modules shall be recorded, accounted for, and fixed before proceeding to the next step listed above. Expect a considerable overlap of activities and the required reiteration of earlier stages a number of times throughout the project life cycle. Finally scale back product features if possible to maintain scheduled timelines.

References:

• ISO - International Organization for Standardization
• Praxiom: ISO 9000 Principles
• Strategos - ISO Summary
• Birds-Eye Network Services