Staffing, planning, and control of information systems in charitable nonprofit organizations

An object-oriented systems development approach is applied to the planning and control of software development projects with the objective examining places where the computer can provide ‘intelligent’ facilitation of the process. An application design is presented that is based on the procedures used by a moderately sized custom software house. Smalltalk language object classes are defined for project entities such as client, objectives, functions, tasks, and resources. Other objects are used to generate functional and implementation plans and to provide routine reporting, maintenance, and control of active projects. Historical project data can be used to update a planning knowledge base. A constraint directed planning algorithm is used to assign resources and schedule tasks, and points within the system where project management ‘expertise’ can be embedded within the system are identified. It is concluded that the concepts presented within this paper could be extended into related systems design and group decision making activities.