Risk Management (article Critique) - Case Study Example

CITS worked towards two different options of achieving the MIS system - procuring a ready to deploy software and in-house development of the MIS software from scratch. After assessment of pros & cons and the cost benefit analysis CITS decided to develop the MIS system in-house. However, this decision caused trouble times due to attrition of key people and lack of specialists. The project was finally completed with the help of final year students and an internal mentor who took the responsibility as part time assignment.

The article finally claims that the MIS system was deployed successfully. The fundamental problem in this case study was lack of appropriate Risk Management. The analysis of the two modes of MIS deployment presented on pages 45 & 46 (Rodrigues. and Govinda. 2003. 45-46) is not promising because it doesn't take into account any risk analysis. The decision of developing in-house was taken purely on financial benefits which again may not have considered the enormous hidden costs in the in-house development process.

Field & Keller (1998: 117) presented that after the risks are assessed and identified, the actions that can be taken are risk avoidance, risk reduction, risk transference, contingency planning and risk acceptance. The project plan of CITS largely ignored these aspects of risk mitigation and hence faced serious obstructions to the project due to attrition of key people and reluctance of end users in the data entry process. The documentation by CITS doesn't even include the project risk management part of the overall planning (Rodrigues.

and Govinda. 2003. 46). Hence, the CITS was greeted with multiple surprises especially due to the people specific issues. The attrition of the system analyst at a time when the decision of developing the MIS in-house was taken recently must have left the CITS with only the high level design documents. At this stage a lecturer was engaged to take the project further who later on utilized his final year students to carry out the coding. The author hereby argues that it is very unlikely that the low level designs and coding standards were established effectively for the project and hence the students might have used ready to compile codes that are available on the Internet.

From the author's perspective, a project managed in this mode might have lived with high risks related to bugs, quality, data security, etc. (although not mentioned specifically in the case study). Hence, the Project Manager might have taken the route of risk acceptance given that he was able to develop & execute a contingency plan that largely worked for him.Comparing with the IS checklist by Cadle & Yeates (2004: 257-261), it appears that many aspects of the checklist were not planned by CITS.

For example, the acceptance criteria, developer's skills, architecture aspects, testing methodologies, staffing requirements, etc, were not analyzed effectively in the MIS strategic plan documented by CITS. The entire plan