4.4 Bottom Line: Time, People, and Money

As a general rule, enterprise software projects requiring more than a year for delivery should be avoided. In a one-year development, at least three to six months should be allocated to the architectural phases (Steps 1 through 6).

The architectural phases require only a minimal staff. The architecture team includes a project manager and a set of one to four architects depending on project complexity. A part-time Run-Ahead Team augments the architecture staff, for implementation exercises, including the Mockup and Architectural Prototype (Steps 3 and 5). A part-time Domain Team assists in drafting the requirements and user interface design. The Domain Team also validates the architecture and the mockup from the end-user perspective.

The development phase is scalable to fit the project complexity and delivery schedule, through small functional teams of developers (ideally teams of four developers on three-month increments).

The schedule breaks down as follows: approximately 50% for system planning and 50% for development. The development efforts would be split about 25% for actual coding and 25% for testing and training. These allocations conform to best practices for project management, which work in multiple domains, including software projects.

Cost estimates include an empirically verified 70% to 30% partition between development and O&M. In addition, a typical project is estimated to require less than 5% of the system budget for the architectural phases.