Dr. Dobb's Journal - February 2009 - (Page 45)

to your list that really aren’t viable not only wastes your time, it also wastes the vendor’s time. Once you’ve gathered information about the candidate packages, the next step is to analyze and then rank your options. This is where many organizations get into trouble because they desperately want to make a perfect decision. The reality is that your choice doesn’t need to be perfect, it just needs to be good enough—perfect decisions can be time consuming and expensive to make, whereas good enough decisions are quicker and much less expensive. Say for example you spend three months comparing five potential packages and decide on package C. You purchase C and then two months later a new version of package A is released that is now slightly better than C. Disaster has struck because your decision is no longer perfect! This sort of oneupmanship between competitors happens continuously, so don’t get caught in a decision-making spiral. An important observation is that by the time you’ve analyzed your viable options, you pretty much know which package is the most likely to meet your needs the best. So, instead of investing time and money in doing a “bake off” between all of the packages, you should instead choose the best option avail- able to you and focus on proving that it meets your needs. This strategy works because if one package is by far ahead of the pack, then assuming that your initial analysis was done competently, chances are very good that’s the package that you’ll go with. If several packages are pretty much equal, according Develop features list Issue Request for information (RFI) (optional) Analyze and rank proposals Inception Install best candidate No Evaluate candidate package Yes No Choose the appropriate process Package implementation Decision already made? Other Release into production Transition Modify or configure package Construction Yes Good Enough? Elaboration Figure 1: Package implementation process. Serial in the large, agile in the small. Solutions for every world. Visual Modeling for Business, IT and Systems Enterprise Architect from Sparx Systems redefines visual modeling with a huge set of built-in tools, technologies and capabilities, coupled with a lightweight footprint and great agility. With deep support for UML 2.1 and its related standards, Enterprise Architect 7.1 is the ideal tool to analyze, design, build and manage your next software project. February 2009 l www.ddj.com l Dr. Dobb’s Journal 45 http://www.sparxsystems.com http://www.sparxsystems.com http://www.ddj.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Dr. Dobb's Journal - February 2009

Dr. Dobb's Journal - February 2009 Contents Friday Night Fish Fry Alia Vox Developer Diaries Conversations Computing in the Clouds Software Development in the Cloud Videos and Oracle Forms 10g Parallel LINQ Decoupling C Header Files Effective Concurrency Disciplined Agility Swaine’s Flames

Dr. Dobb's Journal - February 2009

For optimal viewing of this digital publication, please enable JavaScript and then refresh the page. If you would like to try to load the digital publication without using Flash Player detection, please click here.