How to Write a Feasibility Report, for IT Professionals

Every programmer/engineer/IT professional will come across a “feasibility report” request within their career. But what is that, and how do you create one? This article will guide you through the task.

Feasibility is the act of evaluating the conditions and determining whether the benefits of completing a task covers the cost of said task or not, therefore whether it’s worth doing the task or not. A feasibility report, often asked for before starting any project, is a report that holds the overall analysis and the feasibility of the project.

A software project, or rather a program, is a solution to a real-life problem. Therefore the first step is to define the problem correct and clear to your supervisor. The definition should include the answers to following questions:

• Why do we need to build a new IT system(program)?
• Is it truly necessary to build this project?
• What are the benefits and capacity (ie. how many users will this program serve approximately) of this project?
• What are the ambitions of this project? Are these ambitions realistic and necessary?
• What were the downsides of the previous system(if available)?

The analyst should make sure to add their experience with the project on hand, the system used before, the problem itself or the previous similar projects they’ve worked on as well. If there were similar projects to the one the team is building, the analyst study those projects and find faults & bugs in order to create a better one.

The details and the limits of the project that couldn’t be foreseen will be revealed during the analysis phase of the project, and therefore, it’s important to do a through research on this step. Then, we can proceed with the report.

While the first thing that comes to mind is the money when we’re talking about benefits and costs, a project’s feasibility must be evaluated from many different angles. Hence, we have five types of a feasibility report that needs to be prepared for an IT system:

1. Corporation and Culture Feasibility: Does the number of employees, the skill of employees, the corporation type and the employee type suit the project’s needs? Does the culture of the people that the project targets oppose the project in any way? For example, the employees might fear that a software that is built in order to help them with their tasks on the job is going to take their place and cause them to be fired: causing troubles in the production, sales and accounting departments. To avoid such problems, the feasibility report will have to warn the managers about that the current employees should be assigned to new tasks rather than getting fired and they should be informed about this as soon as possible.
2. Technical Resource Feasibility: This type of feasibility analysis explains whether the project can be completed under the current technological conditions. This analysis should consider the current conditions of the country the project targets, the limits of the current technology, the current employees and other agents available (and the quality of them), the current hardware and software available. The feasibility report should include whether the system depends on abroad resources, how long the estimated life cycle of the project will last, whether there are enough technological resources at hand etc.
3. Legal Feasibility: This type of feasibility analysis should test whether the technological steps and changes within the project are legal, and whether the technological processes (payments, online signatures etc.) one with the real-life ones in terms of law. The report should contain answers to whether the project is legal, whether there could be bugs that might cause a legal process getting started and what actions could be taken to avoid such scenarios. The report is supposed to prove that the project is completely legal, that every tool used within the project is bought and licensed legally, and that there is a bounding legal contract within the parties.
4. Financial Feasibility: This type of feasibility report should contain all expenses and whether the current budget covers it.
5. Scheduling and Time Feasibility: This type of feasibility report should contain a time schedule for the project, estimated time it would take for each step to become built, whether the project can be finished by the time it’s supposed to be finished, and whether all team members working on this project are available during their own assigned schedule.

These five feasibility reports for an IT system is what the legs are for a table; if only one or more of these reports show that the cost is greater than the benefit on that aspect, the project will fail.