Deciding how to build it
Once you know what you need to build, you need to decide how you want to build it. There are three major decisions that you need to take. They are as follows:
How much do we build at a time
How much do we build ourselves
How do we integrate
Deciding how much to build at a time
If you are building a new system to support a process that has not had IT support earlier, you can build it in one large chunk or in several smaller chunks. The advantage of the large chunk is that you only have to spend resources on one go-live process. On the other hand, if something does not work, you might have developed hundreds of screens with a wrong approach and have to change them.
If you are replacing an existing system (for example, an Oracle Forms-based system), you need to decide if you want to attempt a "big bang" replacement of the entire old system with a new one or if you want a phased approach. As it is much easier to run one system than to run two, some people prefer the "big bang...
