Reference no: EM131278274

Write a research paper on "Hennepin county medical Center Systems Development Process".

Hennepin county medical center.

1.Does the organization have a published policy and/or procedures covering outsourcing or service level agreements with outside vendors? If the policy and/or procedures exist, please obtain a copy of the relevant policy and/or procedures and summarize them in the report.

As an example of this, let's say the organization is using one or more Cloud providers to host its business software applications. Is there a policy defined for contracting to Cloud providers?

2. If there are no published application development/acquisition policy and/or procedures, are there standards or a "best practices" that the IT organization follows to ensure that development and/or acquisition activities are performed uniformly and completely? If yes, are they written? If they are written, please obtain a copy and, again, summarize them in your report. If they are not written (i.e. they exist but are informal), what are they and how are they conveyed to the project manager and application designer?

3. If no development/acquisition procedures or standards exist, are application designers or development/acquisition project managers expected to use a particular process or methodology? If yes, what is that process and how is that information conveyed to the project manager and application designer?

4. Was the methodology used similar to any of the methodologies mentioned in the readings on Systems Development (i.e. Waterfall/Agile/Scrum/RUP ) [See pages 345-354]

5. Does the organization have IT Governance, Risk and Compliance Requirements in place?

2. Establishing the requirements / project leadership

1. How was the need for the subject application established?

2. Was a formal needs analysis performed?

3. Who made the initial request for the activity that culminated in this application development/acquisition? Was a feasibility study performed?

4. Describe the process of gathering the business requirements for the information system?

5. Did the requirements gathering effort for the application include all the people who could have been included? Were all stakeholders represented?

6. Who were the participants? How did they contribute?

7. What formal documentation was developed during the requirements gathering process?

8. Who reviewed the requirements? Who signed off on them? Who was (were) the executive sponsor(s) for the project?

9. Who were the real champions of the project? What motivated them?

10. How did the project leader(s) manage overall communications to all stakeholders?

11. Were there issues associated with the project development / acquisition and implementation that generated disagreements within the organization's project team? If so, how were these issues resolved?

12. Change Management – How were the changes managed?

3. Systems development options and decisions

1. Does the organization you are studying have a viable IT application development staff?

2. What were the options considered for developing or purchasing the application?

2.1. Was a decision made to develop the application in-house or to outsource the development?

2. Was a decision made to purchase an existing commercially available application?

3. Which of these options were considered prior to this decision?

4. Who made the decision? When was it made? If justification for the decision was announced, how was it justified?

5. Is the decision about how to develop (or outsource/purchase) the application part of a larger movement by this organization "to the cloud" or even just part of a shift towards using more purchased applications?

6. What kind of RFP (Request for Proposal) process was followed (if any)?

7. If an external vendor was engaged was a service level agreement executed with that vendor?

8. Did the application need to be customized to meet all the business requirements? Who was responsible for the customizing?

9. Were any business requirements changed to fit the application? Who was responsible for approving the changes?

Application implementation

The work of the development or acquisition team doesn't end with the delivery of a completed application. There is a lot left to do. Implementing the information system is a complex process that includes testing, training, documentation, acceptance, integration with existing systems, and cutover to production.

1. How did the project participants know that the development process was completed?

2. Who managed the implementation process (IT staff, business user, or vendor)?

3. Who participated in the implementation process (testing, installation, acceptance, training, ready for use, cutover)? Include names and organizations?

4. What additional testing was performed during implementation? System testing? Stress Testing? Beta testing? Acceptance testing? Who prepared the test scripts?

5. How was system acceptance accomplished? What acceptance criteria were used? Who defined the criteria? Was there any concern that the application wouldn't be accepted? Please explain.

6. How was the cutover to the new application accomplished? When was it accomplished?Was any consideration given to whether the application could accommodate projected horizontal and/or vertical growth? Could it?

7. Are any special skills, training, or expertise necessary to install, implement (and customize) this application? Does the organization staff have those skills and expertise? If not, what actions have the organization taken to acquire them?

8. How were users and operators trained for the new system?