Post-Project Activities, Essay Example

Systems development projects are not necessarily completed once the project has been passed from development into the operational environment.  Although from a Finance perspective the system has been completed and closed, from a systems perspective this passes from development to maintenance.  So in essence the end milestone indicates the end of the development cycle and the commencement of the system being migrated to maintenance.  The Maintenance division will deal with a number of new requests from the now operational system. This will include such items as (i) System Enhancement Requests (ii) Completion of new releases and upgrades (iii) Any patches that might be needed or system additions  (iv) investigation of any problems in the software and applying remedial action.  (Kelly, A. 2006).

Another important aspect is that of  Disaster Recovery / Business Continuity planning and ensuring that any critical systems are mirror imaged to a DR site.  In addition any future maintenance or enhancement issues have to be copied to the DR site in order to main an effective back up operation.  This is of particular importance in Financial organizations like Banks or Insurance Companies but it is a widely held mandatory requirement for most firms.  (Dolewski, R. 2008).

So really it is a question of interpretation.  The Project Manager will consider it the end of the project once testing has been completed and the project is migrated from development to Operations.  Sign-off by the Project Board closes the project in Development. The PM is now finished and moves on.  Maintenance now takes over the responsibility for the live running of the system until it is subsequently phased out or replaced.  The cost of the project is measured in terms of Development ( Inception to implementation) and Maintenance ( ongoing running costs). ( Rainer, R.K.  2009)

Works Cited

Dolewski, R. (2008). System i Disaster Recovery Planning. New York: MC Press.

Kelly, A. (2006). Maintenance systems and documentation. Burlington MA: Elsevier.

Kelly Rainer, C. G. (2009). Introduction to Information Systems: Enabling and Transforming Business. New York: Wiley.