Systems Development and Project Management Information technology is an important part of a company's future success. For companies to compressively move into the future, they must continue to improve their information technology. The systems development process and its management are important aspects of strategically enhancing the existing corporate information system or improving it for the future. Systems development can be simply described as the process by which you develop the product or products that meet the needs of your organization. This type of development process is described as a waterfall process. There are a couple of development processes, but the one we mostly talk about is the waterfall process. The other type of development process is the iterative process. This type of process is mostly used by commercial developers for a client who isn't quite sure what they want developed for them. Each of the processes has a model that describes a large amount of tasks or activities that occur when using one of the processes. To name a few models you have, the Waterfall model, the Spiral, the prototype and the Evolutionary model. To explain a pattern, an example would be Waterfall. The model is practically the same as the Waterfall process. This particular template shows the progression of your project. You start by receiving, processing and sending your input to the next task as input and the process continues until you have the final product as output. Each process and module has positive and negative aspects depending on the type of product or system you are developing. According to Travis Bakersville in his article "The Impact of Computer-Aided Technologies on Information Systems Development", there are five types of system development methodologies. The types are structured approach, prototyping/iterative approach, rapid application development, object-oriented, and other types. Based on the above typologies, 76.5% of organizations use the structured approach. Of these different methodologies, a survey was conducted to see how companies were acquiring their methodology. According to Judy Wynekoop, 35% of organizations purchased their methodology and 65% developed theirs in-house. There are numerous surveys and comments from various IT managers who believe that every project development should use a methodology. However, it is common opinion that no particular methodology is appropriate for every project development process and every IS manager reports changing methodologies depending on the project.