The 3M Company is a type of engineering company based in the United States of America and formerly referred to as Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing Company. The company is situated in town of Maplewood, Minnesota and itis USA multinational conglomerate corporation.
It is one of leading engineering companies worldwide and what makes it most successfully is its annual sales which is greater than $30 billion sales every year. Also, 3M yields products which are more than 55,000 and employs 90,000 persons globally. Some of the products that are manufactured at 3M includes: abrasive, adhesives, passive fire control, individual protective equipment, laminates, electronic materials, dental and orthodontic products, medical products, electronic circuits, optical films, healthcare circuits and car-care products( wax, polish, car shampoo, sun films, treatment for interior, under an exterior chassis rust protection).
The 3M has stabilized in more than 65 nations, and it consists of 29 worldwide companies and other 35 firms with laboratories. The products of 3M are available for purchasing online straight from the firm and also through retailers and distributors (Plomp 33). The company’s experts use 46 technology platforms to increase customers’ tastes and preferences. The company has been able to maintain its competitive advantage over the other companies due to its high level of innovation. The employees in the company are highly experienced ant that is the reason why there is frequent innovation.
Waterfall methodology
The waterfall model is a type of classical model which is used in system development life cycle to come up with a system which applied a sequential and linear approach. The reason why it is called waterfall model is that the model progresses systematically from one stage to another in a downward style. The waterfall model is consists of different phases, and the results of one phase are used as the inputs of the succeeding phase. Before next phase is started, the previous phase has to be accomplished, and another condition is that there is no overlapping of the stages. This stage includes requirement phase, system design, implementation, verification, and maintenance.
Requirements phase
In software application growth, the requirements stage emphasis on capturing and defining the problems and needs that a software application is to solve and to address. This is the first stage in the waterfall development model, laying the foundation for the other stages of the software application development. The main goal of requirement stage to come on with Requirement specification documents. The focussed is to outline the needs in as detail and as clear as possible. Generally to collect, gather and capture the requirements; a team of experts who are dedicated is setup to capture all the needs.
The needs capture group mostly consists of Subject Matter Experts (SMEs), Business Users and Business Analysts. In general, the SMEs and Business Users are responsible for giving requirements verbally while the Business Analysts document them and capture them. Normally requirements are captured in Requirements Specification designs. These templates are provided by Quality Management System (QMS) or organizational template framework.
The method of getting information includes: interview sheets, questionnaires, white board, face to face/video/voice meetings, modeling tools are made to precisely capture the Business User’s and SME’s inputs in requirements (Plomp 83). The items to be captured include Usability Requirements, Functional Requirements, Legal compliance Requirements, Maintainability Requirements, Integration Requirements and many more others.
After completion of requirement document then the Business Users and SMEs review it. The purposes of doing this are to make sure that likely requirements are captured, clear to understand and are detailed enough. After the analyses of the needs, the document of the requirement is signed off to be utilized additionally in other stages of the waterfall model.
Design
This stage looks at how the software will be constructed and how the system works with specific emphasis on software, hardware, user interface and network infrastructure. The main role of this phase is to build a blueprint that will fulfill all documented requirements then to ascertain all processes, outputs, and inputs needed and moreover to assist in avoiding errors by involving the shareholders such as users and managers.
The design consists of two types that is physical design and logical design. The logical design which comprises of the design of reports and forms, the database design and the design of the interface. Another type of design is a physical database which is pertained with designing of the programs and processes, the distributed systems and physical database. At the conclusion of the design stage, we have the SDS that is system design specification. The SDS contains the system design, component and the process design, project scope, a system design, prototype analysis and system files to name a few. This type of document has all information necessary to develop the system.
Implementation
This stage is mainly concerned with the physical building of the software as set out in the design phase. The main group of people who are responsible for this stage is development team which comprises of interface designers, programmers, and other experts. The main role of this stage is to develop reliable and workable software. Also, it documents tasks that have been done to date, and it gives help for existing and intended handlers of the system. The actions that take occurred at this stage includes coding which is where the physical design provisions are turned into operational computer code. Another is testing which is done in parallel with coding to approve that the system meets the condition set out. This is achieved through unit testing, inspection or walk through. Other activities in this stage are documentation for the IS users, training and support.
Maintenance
This is the final stage of the waterfall model. In case any new system is put in place it will occasionally need ongoing maintenance. The main aim is to make sure that the software is functioning at optimum levels of performance. This can pertain to viruses in the software, issues of security or to address matters that have only been recognized when the new system was implemented. Activities in this stages consist of obtaining maintenance requests from consumers, designing the changes, transforming these request into viable changes and implementing those changes.
The maintenance phase is of four types namely, corrective which is concerned to get rid of errors from the software. Secondly is adaptive, its primary purpose to improve the system by addition of new features, capabilities, and purposes as a result of new technologies. Another type of maintenance is perfective, it expands the qualities of the system, and it is mainly done because of requests by the consumers. The last type is preventative, which deals with the anticipation of problems and modifying them before they occurred.
This stage can meaningfully affect by each earlier step in the model, for instance, errors made during analysis and design can extremely hinder the achievement of the new system. The maintenance phase is a reactive stage in which faults are addressed so that the system can function effectively.
Improvements
The first improvements by making a project easy to manage. The project should be known where it has reached regarding its development and if that is where it should be and this is achieved through the sequential system (Plomp 99). Instead of scrambling to bring about a large group, a boss should focus solely on group members take part in a given stage.
The second improvement is saving money and time. In case a company decided to fully commit to waterfall project management, there is no question that certain features of this approach-namely, detailed documentation and thorough conceptualization. It is better to execute task the right way the first time. Taking the time early on to plan and discover for requirements can save time and funds down the line
Keeping training simple is another key factor to improvement. This approach makes sure there is an achievement even if there are unexpected changes in bandwidth. Since waterfall model emphasizes detailed documentation, you can seamlessly and effortlessly add new group members to any task. It is not necessary to intuit what absent systems analyst was trying to do, as everything- from the project’s beginning to its end is recorded. New group members can just refer to the documentation to get fast up to speed.
Work Cited
Plomp, Tj. Cross-national Information and Communication Technology Policies and Practices in Education. Information Age Pub, 2003.
