The project completed at the first development sprint with the development of the website pages in HTML and CSS, and one page operating with the back end database using PHP.
Ideally if time permitted a second development sprint would have made a major difference to the functionality of the online version.
The original project objectives, goals and deliverables set out in Section 1.3 are shown in Table 29.
Table 29 - Project Objectives and Deliverables
Project Successes
The strengths in the project were in meeting the objectives to investigate current compliance systems on the market and the key drivers for organisations purchasing access management tools. The idea for User Guardian as a lightweight tool to check for compliance breaches using exception reports rather then risk based scoring seems to be a valid one, supported by the User Survey in Section 3.4.
The Identity Access Management (IAM) market space is an area of growth, growing 20% annually as discussed in Section 2.8.1 and will be a future concern for individuals and organisations as discussed in the PESTLE analysis in section 2.6.
These facts are positive regarding the sustainability of a developing tool like User Guardian that is built as a flexible web based development and can be tailored to this emerging market place.
One possible market threat for larger IAM vendors is the ability to adapt an already large and highly developed product to meet the needs of managing access across the increasing number of SaaS (Software as a Service) or "Cloud" based applications being used.
Project Challenges
The project met all of the objectives however there were challenges in implementing the coded online version of the User Guardian tool. In hindsight too much effort was devoted to the market research and investigation section of the project. Arguably if the product was to become a professional development it would be well worth spending the time doing this to prevent spending time and money developing a tool that is not commercially viable.
The success of the project could have been improved with more time devoted to the coding of the application to demonstrate the usefulness of User Guardian. These challenges are discussed in greater details in section 6.2 (Project Management) and 6.3 (Professional and Practical Implications).
Summary
Overall the goals set at the beginning of the development were met and the User Guardian idea could be a useful and time saving tool for IT security, application and compliance teams in small to medium sized enterprises who do not already have an IAM tool.
The challenges for User Guardian are scaling the tool up with the complexity of multiple applications and bespoke methods of importing the data from these applications. For User Guardian to be a successful product more time would need to be invested in this area to ensure the tool remains quick and easy to implement to gain results from it. Further discussion on this topic can be found in section 6.5 (Further development).