subject: Factors Effecting Development Of Your It Company [print this page] IT departments are able to deliver enough value to become profit centers.One of the key factors in determining whether an IT department is delivering ROI has to do with the development efforts occurring within that department.IT Development provides multi-disciplinary consultancy, applications engineering and software engineering for the process control industry. according to our point of views, here are the many most common ways that IT departments spend money on development and its improvement.
Communication issues are one of the biggest causes of project failure these issues are magnified with internal projects. Just because the customer works in the same building and has their paycheck signed by the same person as you doesnt mean there wont be communication problems. In fact, internally facing projects are often worse than projects for paying customers because internal customers dont have to adhere to a contract, and no tangible value is placed upon the work.
In these situations, there is little incentive for the customers to work well with you, and if communication breaks down, they complain about how IT is stonewalling us. The result is wasted time and money due to things being delivered late, delivered wrong, or not delivered at all.
This is no way to run development projects. All too often, the IT department eventually tires of it, tries to establish some sort of process to put on the brakes, and gets initial buy-in from leadership. And when the other departments think IT is stonewalling us, leadership changes course and rescinds their buy-in without telling IT.
Offshore workers are an entirely different issue. its extraordinarily difficult to manage a project that is developed offshore. Chances are, youll need at least one employee for every couple of your offshore workers just to manage them and keep track of what is happening.keeps the product from ever reaching the users, what happens if the users never get documentation or training? Unless your application is as easy to use as, say, a phone book, its unlikely anyone will ever use it. Unused applications are the biggest waste of time and money possible because you went through the whole development cycle for nothing.you could have paid your team to sit at home playing video games and have gotten the same results.
Many companies arent set up well for development, especially if there are only a few developers on staff. There is a lot more to working on code than having a standard desktop PC with an IDE installed and a few books on the desk.
There should be version control systems and bug tracking applications for all but the smallest of shops, for example. Developers will probably need additional support from IT, such as test machines (physical or virtual), database servers isolated from the production servers, and maybe a section of the network set aside to contain disasters if needed.
When developers dont have the necessary resources to work safely and effectively, their work is slowed down, or it impacts the rest of the company in negative ways. Think about it. if a developers faulty test code blows up a database server, wouldnt you rather they didnt blow up the one that the accounting system is also running on?
There is a fundamental flaw with many IT development projects: No one tried to calculate ROI before giving the go-ahead. Yes, ROI calculations tend to be overly optimistic and difficult to get right (or even close to right), even after the project is in production. And yet, some projects are clearly a waste of money.
