A Roadmap for Setting Goals and Achieving Success
The
purpose of the milestone-based thinking is to choose the right goals and objectives and organize
yourself to attain them. A flexible, milestone-based approach will help you understand,
meet, and even anticipate the specific needs of your
business – all while making the most of your current technology
investments. Milestone-based thinking can help you organize your activities and
your available resources into a logical sequence of steps or stages. In
your role as a manager, milestone-based thinking helps you understand the
priorities at each stage of your company’s or project development,
operations, and growth. Externally, milestone-based thinking helps
you communicate to potential partners what you are attempting to do, why it is
important, and how each activity contributes to the achievement of the overall
goal.
Shortcomings
of the Traditional Process Models
The traditional Systems Development
Life Cycle (SDLC) used by many companies is activity- or task-driven. With
variations across methodologies, the traditional life cycle typically consists
of the distinct phases shown in the following list: Definition; Analysis; Design;
Construction; Test; Transition and Migration; Production.
The term "phase" implies
that each set of tasks must be completed before the next phase can begin.
Typically, different teams handle each phase in
the life cycle, and each phase must be heavily documented to allow for a
different team to pick up the next phase. As a result, decisions freeze early
and flexibility is minimized.
While this model provides a useful
way to categorize the types of tasks that occur throughout the development life
cycle, it does not recognize or leverage the characteristics of component-based
enterprise development.
The major problem with the waterfall
process model for component-based development is that it is task-focused
rather than process-oriented. This makes it difficult to make the
flexible decisions and meet the rapidly changing priorities that are vital to
managing an enterprise development project with its multiple components and
heavy emphasis on user interface requirements.
Advantages and
Characteristics of the Milestone-Based Process Model
Overcoming these drawbacks requires a more
flexible, iterative, process-oriented development model. The milestone-based
process model is derived from the product life cycle model proven so successful
within Microsoft Corporation. It encourages thinking about work in terms of processes
rather than tasks. Milestones mark the self-regulation points of these
processes.
The four characteristics of
the milestone-driven model are:
· Milestone-based approach. The
application development process is driven by external and internal milestones, which
are checkpoints to guide the development process.
· Clear ownership and accountability. The
process model connects responsibility for each milestone to the project team
roles.
· Risk-driven scheduling. High
risk components of a project are completed as early as possible.
· Versioned releases. The
concept of versioned releases is an important one throughout the systems
development life cycle because it impacts how expectations are set and how the
entire project
is planned and managed.
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