Project Scheduling

It is important, right at the start of the design process, for the designer or design team, to set clear objective. The primary objectives will always be to design a system that delivers the functions required by the client to support the business objective of their organization. For example the system may be required to speed up the production of accurate invoices, or to provide up to date, detailed management information to improve the managing director’s control over the business; or to help senior managers to make strategic decisions. In the other words, to be a quality product – the system must conform to the customer’s requirements and be delivered in a way, which meets their expectations in terms of service. There are many ways in which these requirements might be mat by a physical design solution, but there are a number of other objectives that must be considered if a god design is to be produced. The design objective is:

Flexible:

The design should enable future requirements of the business to be incorporated with out too much difficulty. Often during the analysis phase, users may not be clear about exactly what they will require from the new system, for example which reports will be most useful to them. However during the evaluation period after the new system becomes operational, the real needs often emerge and flexible design will be able to accommodate these new requirements .In addition, business change over time and a good design enable the system to reflect these changes.

Maintainable:

This is closely linked to the previous objective because it is about change. A good design is easy to maintain ands this reduces the client’s maintenance costs, which usually represent a high proportion of the total lifetime cost of the system.

Portable:

Still on the subject of change, a client who has bought a software system may wish to change the hardware on which the system runs .A good design is portable-in other words it is capable of being transferred from one machine environment to another with the minimum amount of effort to convert it.

Easy to use:

With the increasing exposure of people to computer applications in the home as well as in the office, expectations of computer systems in terms of their ease of use are also increasing. A good design will result in a system which is ‘user friendly’ –easy to understand, not difficult to learn how to use and straightforward to operate.

Reliable:

This objective is about designing systems which are secure against human error, deliberate misuse of machine failure, and in which data will be stored without corruption. While this is desirable in any computer system, for certain systems in the areas of defence, process control or banking, it will be a key design objective.

Secure:

Security is nether objective that must be considered by the designer .In order to protect the confidentiality of the data, particularly if it is commercially sensitive, it may be important to build in methods to restrict access to authorized users only, for example by introducing passwords.

Programmer-friendly:

While the other objective are mainly about delivering benefits to the client, the designer must also consider how easy it will be for the programmers to produce the code from the program specifications. By producing a programmer- friendly design, both the costs of production and the risk of building in errors are reduced.

Cost-effective:

his includes a number of the other objectives, and is about designing a system that delivers the required functionally, ease (simplicity) of use, reliability, security, etc. to the client in the most cost-objective way.