During the analysis phase, gather your department's business requirements and environmental considerations. At the end of this phase, decide whether you will build or buy your proposed system.

1.0 Capture and analyze your requirements and identify critical issues

The analysis should include consideration of the following:

• Business functions to be developed
• All data required for these business functions
• Business rules determining data behavior, constraints, limits, relationships, life-cycle
• Business function flow
• Related business systems on and off campus
• Interfaces with other external and internal business systems
• Existing data that may have to be converted
• Opportunities for re-engineering
• Preliminary transition plan
• Security requirements
• Campus and departmental technical environment and standards (includes: security, network, hardware, database, desktop tools, middleware, and application software delivery issues)
• Technical architectures which maximize opportunities for appropriate sharing of information across the campus community
• Critical success factors (up-time, business response time, etc.)
• Architectural issues such as network and systems capacity planning
• Campus policy affected
• Contingency planning

2.0 Decide whether to build or buy the proposed business system

The following are factors in deciding to buy or build a business system:

• Survey of the marketplace which indicates availability of products that would address the majority of your business problems
• Product compatibility with campus technical environment and standards (includes security, network, hardware, database, desktop tools, middleware, and application software delivery issues)
• Full life-cycle cost of a buy versus build decision, including customization cost
• Availability of internal resources to build a system
• Availability of contract resources to augment staff to build a system
• Consideration of the time-frame of buy versus build

3.0 Initiate Operations Planning

Start to address the following operational issues, and plan to refine procedures and measures strategies throughout the project:

• Determine how the application will be deployed
• Determine how technical and functional upgrades be accomplished
• Determine desktop and server hardware and need to upgrade or change end-user desktop computers
• Determine timing and strategy for backing up data
• Initiate disaster planning
• Determine resources to support ongoing operations addressing application and hardware maintenance
• Develop a communication plan

4.0 Produce an analysis summary of high level conclusions

The analysis summary should include an assessment of the following:

• Acceptable approaches
• Acceptable technologies and general architectures
• Unacceptable approaches
• Unacceptable technologies and general architectures
• Risks
• Opportunities for re-engineering
• Refinement of resource needs (people, money, environment)

5.0 Prototype Phase

Develop a prototype if there are candidate technologies or approaches which require further investigation for viability or suitability as a result of the analysis phase. The prototype can continue to evolve throughout the project life-cycle.