Problem Statement It has been noted that shortcomings in the Veteran Health Administration (VHA) system that systematic issues affecting the Return on Investment (ROI) may be due to improper adherence to the steps in the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC). This document presents key areas of the SDLC that may be behind the shortcomings and recommends a root cause analysis study. Context The Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) is series of steps that play an integral role in the production of software. The cycle includes system engineering, software requirements analysis, systems analysis and design, generation of code, testing and maintenance (Lewis 26). Based on reports from the PE Lessons Learned team, it has been reported that during development of the VHA system systematic issues suggest poor adherence to the SDLC. In turn this may be responsible for poor Return on Investment (ROI) for the project. Because of this several areas have been identified that could be the reason behind the poor performance of the project. Concept Initiation Issues attributed to poor adherence to the SDLC of the VHA system can be traced to concept initiation. Evidence in support of this is identified in the GAO report which highlights the fact that despite spending large sums on money and time on the VA project implementation is yet to be done on many of the projects. It has been observed that an estimated $127 million has been spent on this project over a period of nine years. It should be noted that of this amount $62 million of the amount was to be spent on planning, management support development equipment and environment. It has also been noted that the department also paid a further $65 million to the contractor to develop the replacement scheduling system. It should be noted that prior to initiation of the project the VA system relied on an outpatient scheduling system that was over 25 years old. Given that in 2009, VA terminated the contract supporting the development of a suitable scheduling project one can understand why so many defects still exist in the system. His is because if the scheduling system is so significant, the VA should have first developed this system before undertaking other systems. As a result of this poor planning it was noted that the project was still plagued by a number of defects that VA and the contractor were unable to resolve. It has therefore been concluded that it is likely that VA did not adequately plan its acquisition of the scheduling application. This can be traced to the fact that one of the best practices in development of software is to closely align software projects with business or organizational goals (ISACA 116). Concept Definition Another shortcoming that is attributable to lack of adherence to the SDLC is observed when considering concept definition. This is because an SDLC can be broken into three main stages namely, definition, construction and the implementation phases (Tan and Sheps 296). In the definition phase, the project team attempts to provide a detailed explanation of what the system is expected to accomplish. It is based on these requirements that the software engineering specialists develop the proposed solution (Tan and Sheps 296). It is therefore clear that an incomplete or