(^128) 97 Things Every Project Manager Should Know
Know Your Integration Points
Monte Davis, MCSE
Omaha, Nebraska, U.S.
ThE hEARTAChE oF EvERy SySTEMS ADMInISTRAToR, development engi-
neer, and software project manager is systems integration. No matter how
promising a newly created application, a freshly purchased software package,
or a long-awaited, new-feature-laden upgrade, the business value rests in get-
ting it to work smoothly within the existing company system.
If you are an experienced project manager, but new to the information tech-
nology arena, don’t let the term integration confuse you. Integration simply
means linking together all of your various software programs so that all of
the subsystems work together to give you more functionality than you could
gain from any one application on its own. For example, you want data entry to
occur only once and the information to flow smoothly to sales representatives,
to accounts payable and receivable, and into other systems that allow various
employees to pull up the information they want, regardless of the software
interface they open.
Unfortunately, it’s often a tense time when new software upgrades are required.
They may introduce trouble into a smoothly running process flow. Recently,
we had a situation where an upgrade was scheduled for one of our systems.
During the upgrade process, the vendor encountered unexpected errors.
There were several views (preprogrammed screens configured to show spe-
cific segments of the database information) that were causing the upgrade to
fail. The outside vendor doing our upgrade didn’t know what the views were
being used for, so it deleted them. The rest of the upgrade appeared smooth.
Several days later, a service desk ticket was submitted for a completely separate
system that was having issues. Users weren’t seeing any new customer data
come across from the system that had been upgraded the previous weekend.