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580 Part Four Building and Managing Systems

TABLE 14.5 ORGANIZATIONAL FACTORS IN SYSTEMS PLANNING AND
IMPLEMENTATION

Employee participation and involvement
Job design
Standards and performance monitoring
Ergonomics (including equipment, user interfaces, and the work environment)

Employee grievance resolution procedures
Health and safety
Government regulatory compliance

lists the organizational dimensions that must be addressed when planning and
implementing information systems.
Although systems analysis and design activities are supposed to include
an organizational impact analysis, this area has traditionally been neglected.
An organizational impact analysis explains how a proposed system will
affect organizational structure, attitudes, decision making, and operations.
To integrate information systems successfully with the organization, thorough
and fully documented organizational impact assessments must be given more
attention in the development effort.

Sociotechnical Design
One way of addressing human and organizational issues is to incorporate
sociotechnical design practices into information systems projects. Designers
set forth separate sets of technical and social design solutions. The social
design plans explore different workgroup structures, allocation of tasks, and
the design of individual jobs. The proposed technical solutions are compared
with the proposed social solutions. The solution that best meets both social and
technical objectives is selected for the final design. The resulting sociotechni-
cal design is expected to produce an information system that blends technical
efficiency with sensitivity to organizational and human needs, leading to higher
job satisfaction and productivity.

PROJECT MANAGEMENT SOFTWARE TOOLS

Commercial software tools that automate many aspects of project man-
agement facilitate the project management process. Project management
software typically features capabilities for defining and ordering tasks, assign-
ing resources to tasks, establishing starting and ending dates to tasks, tracking
progress, and facilitating modifications to tasks and resources. Many automate
the creation of Gantt and PERT charts.
Some of these tools are large sophisticated programs for managing very large
projects, dispersed work groups, and enterprise functions. These high-end
tools can manage very large numbers of tasks and activities and complex
relationships.
Microsoft Office Project 2010 has become the most widely used project
management software today. It is PC-based, with capabilities for producing
PERT and Gantt charts and for supporting critical path analysis, resource alloca-
tion, project tracking, and status reporting. Project also tracks the way changes

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