When thinking about building a new system, many people think of the endeavor as a “do it once” project. You’ll create the system in-house (or take advantage of outsourcing), it’ll work, and then you’ll just let it run from there. However, this assumption tends to be a little simplistic and may not result in a quality product. Instead, the reality is that most systems development follows the “system development lifecycle,” which has seven phases to it. Let’s take a quick look at what those phases are and how an external group like INVID can help create and maintain your system for you.

What Are the Seven Phases of Systems Development?

The seven phases of systems development are relatively straightforward.

First, you’ll need to plan your project. How will your system work? What problem are you solving? What are your key goals and metrics? These are all the questions that you’ll need to solve during the planning phase. You’ll want to think about the cost, time-to-develop, and other broad-picture resource questions here.

Next, you’ll enter the analysis phase. During this phase, you’ll analyze users’ needs and understand how the system will help. Instead of being abstract in the previous step, you’ll use this step to drill down and deeply understand the end-users and what this system will need to be beneficial.

Thirdly comes the systems design phase. Here, people create detailed specifications, choose technologies, and produce a clear “roadmap” for making the system.

Fourth comes the part everyone is waiting for – development! Here’s where expert programmers, designers, managers, and more come together to begin to write the code necessary for your new system.

As the developers are writing code, integration and testing commence. Quality assurance professionals should test the system regularly to ensure there are no regressions and that the product is progressing towards the stated business goals.

Sixth, once the product nears completion and QA professionals say it’s good, you’ll want to implement it in production. This step typically involves cutting away from the old system, porting data, and putting the new system in its place.

Finally, the last phase involves operations and maintenance. Inevitably, there will be some tuning necessary, bugs to fix, and enhancements to make. This phase covers all of that until you are happy with the system!

When and How Can Outsourcing Benefit?

If you are considering taking advantage of outsourcing, please consider doing so at the earliest stages of the systems development lifecycle. Many people, unfortunately, try and outsource for the development, QA, and implementation phases. However, by then, there have been so many other decisions that the development process may no longer be optimal.

Consider the following toy example. Let’s say a company wants to produce a small banking app, but they are not programmers. They create some specs, and along the way, somebody reads that many large banks still use COBOL. Not wanting to be a “small bank,” they create an entire design around COBOL for the backend.

The problem, of course, is that when they go to outsource it, they’ll have a hard time finding COBOL programmers!

Had they done outsourcing sooner, they could have told them that .NET, Java, and other languages are the secure, preferred ways to handle sensitive financial data.

Ultimately, companies may want to outsource the whole project and not just the coding piece. The result tends to be of higher quality.

Consider INVID Group for the Best Outsourced Solutions

At INVID Group, we have extensive experience with the system development lifecycle and can help your business with its aspects. We can help construct, design, build, and maintain your new system for you!

If you’re looking to construct a new system, please contact us! We’d love to learn more about it and put together a custom quote for you.

Download our e-Book and learn more about System Development Lifecycle.