Personalized Communications

The WCPA places a special emphasis on communications between the three stakeholders in a successful software development project: the developers, the IT operations staff, and the end users. From the very beginning of the process, the WCPA opens the lines of communication between all three groups. The database administrators, system programmers, production control personnel, and computer operations work closely with application developers and end users to understand the requirements necessary to implement and support a distributed web-centric application.

The WCPA's approach of personalized communications contrasts starkly with earlier models of software development, such as waterfall software lifecycles. The WCPA is proactive, not reactive. In the past, the only time MIS would get involved with users was when a problem occurred. Someone would call the Help Desk. The Help Desk would call data center operations. Operations would come to resolve the problem. That was and still is the paradigm in many data centers. This paradigm, however, does not work for today's web-centric applications environments. You need to work closely with your users to solve the business issues of new applications or they will never be successful, no matter how skilled your developers become.

The WCPA is responsible for setting everyone's expectations, for communicating roles and responsibilities, and for establishing how groups and individuals customers and the data center work together. It is a service-level agreement between different organizations.

The WCPA is also the communications vehicle to ameliorate the cultural differences among Unix, PC, and mainframe personnel, applications development, IT support, users, and the data center as they come together to support web-centric projects. Personalized communications is not just a buzzword . It is a new way of doing business and working together for the benefit of the whole enterprise.