Appendix A: Systems Development Life Cycle

Overview

This book covered project management from the perspective of PMI approach. In this appendix, we discuss the Systems Development Life Cycle (SDLC) approach, which is commonly used in managing IT projects. The proclivity of project management methodologies and techniques today, while valuable , may have had an adverse effect on different people working together toward a common goal. Some have had standard systems analysis and design training, and have learned about the Systems Development Life Cycle (SDLC), a more-or-less standardized approach to how people technically trained in Information Technology handle systems development. There are different flavors of the SDLC, but all of them have at their root the elements discussed below.

Project managers with a certification or formal education in project management, as taught by the Project Management Institute (PMI), have a slightly different approach to how projects get done. For starters, the PMI approach, with its five process groups, is more homogeneous in nature-that is, the project at hand doesn't necessarily matter as long it is handled within the context of the methodologies that PMI espouses. On the other hand, SDLC isn't standardized and yet its base features are so fundamentally well known that IT professionals are accustomed to them.

Another camp-the agile development people-have a little different spin on project management, but we won't talk about that in this appendix as it's too far-reaching for the point we're trying to make here.

The differences, while subtle, are vast and could potentially lead to some infighting between your project managers and your technical team. If you know that there are those who 'think SDLC' and those who 'think PMI,' then you've got some points to discuss. The purpose, of course, is to get people aligned down a common road toward successful completion of your project.

If you've had training in Information Technology you may have run across a common systems development methodology that has been worked out over many years of refining and building IT systems. This methodology was originally developed for software developers writing code for mainframe systems, but even in today's complex interaction of software applications with disparate server, network, and Web environments, the methodology still fits a variety of different IT systems.

The Systems Development Life Cycle (SDLC) is a way of thinking about developing and implementing IT systems. The SDLC is built around the notion that a corporate IT department (or departments) handles the job of maintaining the IT infrastructure and works with business entities to build and deploy new systems. The SDLC consists of five phases.