ICT systems are notoriously difficult to produce and tend to be huge undertakings. Systems costing millions of pounds are very common as are systems which take years, even decades, of man power to produce. With all this complexity it is not surprising that a lot of systems end up not providing the level of service required by the people who initialise them. In order to understand the systems lifecycle we need to see

• What is a system and who requires one?
• Why a system might fail
• How a project can be done in a structured way.