Information Systems Delivery Problems – 3 cases

#1 Quality vs. Quantity

Reports are being produced, users have started to test them. Everything seems idealistic… But reports have errors and IT is concentrated on report quantity not quality. Users report errors but IT does not have time to fix them, because reporting quantity needs to be caught.

Reports are top of the ice bergs, with their testing many errors will appear that are not made by reporting platform. Their error source could be deeper in production systems or even in the processes.

#2 Negotiating with vendor

Vendor promises to develop reports. During development old production systems showed that beneath the surface is very complex reporting logic, more complicated then estimated. Engagement of users and existing IT experts is bigger and bigger. Problem is with time, if it is rather old production system 10 years and more it is very likely that there is no documentation, that reports are black boxes, that knowledge about them is somewhere out of the company. It seems that easy task of replacing reports is not any more so easy, but rather extremely costly and time consuming. Even reason to replace old reports might become unreasonable due to high demands not foreseen at the beginning of reporting request.

What is signed in contract? Vendor will deliver report with or without internal support? Is this line of support really detailed or fuzzy… Vendor or customer are right?

#3 Delivery is changeable

Nobody checks initial delivery… After a while they start to implement imports into reports and then they recognize that certain problems appear, data export structure is not appropriate. It is exactly as it was ordered and when connection of data started problems are recognized. Customers now want codes instead of text fields, because text fields can change and are too long (performance issues). This is legitimate requirement and should have been communicated from the beginning, but was not.

Mapping with codes avoids problems with special signs. Catch is… If reports from source systems are hard coded and without codes then it is very hard to deliver codes to other systems.