Project Plan Document

Project Name:

            Dean of Student Affairs Website

Team Name:

            TamerSoft ®

Team Members:

1.      Dickson N. Akabueze (Project Leader)

2.      Tunde Malakai (Programmer, Developer)

3.      Erickson Madison (Interface Designer)

4.      Christabel  Morris (Interface Designer)

5.      Jake Nettings (Software Architect)

6.      John Morgan (Database Administrator)

7.      Stuart Juggins (Host Server Administrator)

8.       Emeka Joyday (Tester)

Budget Breakdown:

1.      Programmer, Developer – 500 USD

2.      Database Administrator’s Fees – 500 USD

3.      Interface Designer – 400 USD

4.      Software’s for design and programming – 500 USD

5.      Miscellaneous expenses – 400 USD

6.      Project Manager- 800 USD

7.      Software Architect – 750 USD

8.      Transportation and Feeding – 300 USD

9.      Host Server Administrator – 400 USD

10.  Tester – 350 USD

Project Plan:

Duration (Calendar)	Start - Finish (Schedule)	%Complete (So Far)	Cost	Work (Hours)
39.5 days	1/02/2012 to 2/8/2012	3%	$5,000	273 hrs.

The project will take approximately 39 days to complete (i.e. a total of 273 hours). According to the work breakdown structure used, the total expenditures to be incurred in the project totals $4000.

The project has a single critical path. The importance of this critical path is to show the shortest time that can be spent on this project, given that all other conditions remains constant.


For detailed info on the files used and pertaining to the preparation of this post, please use the following links to download the respective files on [Professional Project Plan document] and [Work Breakdown Structure of the project plan.]


Project Plan Document: Professional Project Plan Document
Work Break Down Structure Gantt Chart: Gantt Chart With Resources and Costs

____________________________________________________________________

Project Description:

The website will mainly advertise upcoming events organized by the Dean of student’s office. All students will be able to access the various activities area.

The Dean of Student Affairs website has the following requirements and specifications for each category of user:

ü  Dean of Students office and staff: Will be able to do the following listed below;

o   Organize and advertise upcoming events

o   Will be able to authorize activities and to message students.

ü  Club Managers: Will be able to log into the system to;

o    Request for activities to take place.

o   To request or transport and other items

ü  Students: Will be able to access various activities area. No logging detail is required from the user.

Detailed Project Plan

Project Name: Dean of Student Affairs Website      

1.      Project Description

a.      Purpose and Description

The purpose of the website being developed is to help potential users (dean of students, club managers, office staff and students) to request for activities to take place, to request for transport and other items. The dean of students and office staff will be able to access this part of this site to authorize activities and message students.

The site will mainly advertise upcoming events organized by the dean of student’s office. All students will be able to access the various activities.

b.      Stakeholders

Those involved in the project include:

ü  The Dean of student’s affairs office and staff.

ü  Club managers, who will provide data format, then review and approve the website login credentials.

ü  Dean of students office and potential users of the site. Some of them will be a part of the pilot group and participate in “friendly user” testing before going live.

ü  Potential volunteers to work on the website.

c.       Organization

This project is for dean of student’s office, which is directly related to all the faculties present at the European University of Lefke in TRNC. The website will disclose appropriate information to the appropriate individuals within the university.

The dean of student uses this website to perform information relaying and activities scheduling.

d.      Initial Requirements

Each organization has a set of biases and limitations. For example, an organization with all sun servers may not need nor want to evaluate alternative operating systems. Here are some areas:

Ø  Executive Requirements: The website would take the place of the expense, hassle, and delays of product brochures. The link will point potential users to the link. As new posts are added, site visitors would see them listed.

However, the site is also intended to motivate and coordinate volunteers (staff), to serve the administrative aspects of the organization.

Ø  Implementation Requirements: The availability of the website will be advertised. Emails will be sent out.

Ideally, emails will use the new website address. This is a big part of the message posting requirement and the project for informing students.

Ø  Customer functionality requirements – what it has to accomplish for consumers/users: The design of the website is based on review of other sites in the same category and similar technologies in other institutions.

o   Login Accounts for the following user classification:

Ø  Dean of students

Ø  Club managers

Ø  Office staff

Ø  Students

o   Ability to request for activities to take place and other items (to be done by the club managers)

o   Activity authorization by the dean of students and office staff.

o   Message Platform to all the students about the approved event/activity.

Ø  Requirements for Hardware and software tools: The hardware and software tools required for the development of the project is listed below;

o   Options for web server operating system software: The website will use technologies our team is already familiar with: Microsoft Windows NT/2000.

o   Options for Hosting Web Sites: The website will be hosted on machines in the same space as production servers.

Web servers will user redundant RAID-5 drives. The two servers will user Cluster services to hot swap with each other.

o   Options for web server software: To keep things simple, the website will be built with HTML4 and CSS for cross-browser compatibility among browsers (IE 7 and Netscape 4.7 and above).

In the second stage, the site will have a VeriSign certificate for HTTPS/SSL for login pages containing user passwords.

o   Options for creating web content: In the second stage, the web server backend will make use of java2 and BEA Weblogic for visitor personalization.

o   Options for providing interactivity: This website will use these ways to add interactivity:

Ø  Provide forms for users to fill out. Most “free” websites help you send them form input as email to webmasters.

Ø  User animated graphics by creating/using graphic files which show variations of similar graphics quickly in succession (but not in reaction to something a unique computer user does).

Ø  Code JavaScript which only runs on the user’s browsers (on the “client” side)

Ø  “server side” code for processing by web servers:

ü  Not CGI

ü  Active Server Pages

Ø  Java Applets (used by Front Page)

Ø  For streaming sound and video in a continuous flow using the following products:

ü  Microsoft Wav Files for short sounds

ü  Real Audio files from a Real audio/video server (requiring a separate license).

ü  .AVI files

Ø  Options for providing personalization: People don’t want clutter. Custom-construct web pages tailored to the needs and desires of each user:

ü  Offer related topics based on prior selections.

ü  Make requests related to a department belonging to the faculty a club manager belongs to.

ü  Send follow-up emails with additional information related to user selections/requests.

Ø  Infrastructure support requirements: Considering the costs and levels of acceptable risk, computer operations can commit to a “reliable” level of service.

e.      Storyboard

Here the project team lays out the basic elements of the website, and map out how they fit together. The deliverable out of this step is usually a flowchart of user interactions (site map).

Ø  Referrals from prior URL’s.

Ø  Homepage/welcome

Ø  Table of contents hierarchal outline

This is defined by looking both inward at internal desires and outward at the web sites of other organizations:

Ø  In the same industry (direct competitors)

Ø  In the same function serving other customers industries (professional colleagues)

f.        Risk Evaluation

This is a critical aspect of the project; when the project manager and his/her team define the various risks faced by the project. This is the point when the project team balances time, cost and quality tradeoffs.

Ø  Lowest common denominator for common usage or state-of-the-art?

Ø  Availability of personnel and resources: how much of this project have to share people and equipment with other projects?

Ø  Expectations of users: how judgmental or hostile are users?

g.      Prototyping

To reduce development time, this project will whenever feasible, use pre-built components from other sites.

Project Illustrated WBS (Work Breakdown Structure)

Project Illustrated WBS (Gantt Chart Structure)

2.      Design (Elaboration)

To handle complexity efficiently, this project uses an object oriented design approach.

3.      Development (construction)

Ø  Construction: Bulk Programming: To achieve a radically fast development schedule, this project uses what is called the extreme programming approach – where working prototypes are refined with incremental additions integrated on a daily basis throughout the life of the project.

Tasks traditionally reserved for a later phase, such as programming and performance turning, will occur as small parts of programs are solidified. IN fact, teams of two programmers work side-by-side.

Progress is tracked by the amount of functionality available to users and the back-office operations group.

Functionality	Performance Metrics
Default home page from URL	Network Latency baseline
Menu Navigation	Menu Transition baseline
Data entry forms and database processing	Database Response baseline
Interactive Editing & Error Correction	Mixed Client Operations
Imports, Exports, Reports processing	Batch file processing baseline
Background processing	Operations run time baseline

Ø  Functionality Testing: Programmers rush to complete their Initial Handoff, they then make refinements.

o   QA Test Plan: Testers plan their approach using design documents.

o   QA Test Suites: An important part of the extreme programming approach is that as each bug is found, automate tests are written to quickly detect the same bug in the future.

o   Configure QA environment

o   Bug databases: Writing defect (bug) reports.

o   Usability Testing: This includes testing of browser and plug-in compatibility.

o   Handoff Installation

Ø  Scalability and performance tuning: Performance timings are obtained for each functional part of the systems as development is completed. Several aspects of performance are analyzed; memory consumption, memory leaks, and racing conditions. Server failover testing is also performed. Security testing is also performed here.

Ø  Milestone: Prelaunch decision.

4.      Launch (Transition)

Ø  Acquire Training and support capabilities: This begins when the project is approved. This includes establishment of office space and telecom facilities; recruiting, and hiring of support staff.

Ø  Internal Announcement/promotion: This includes installation of production software at customer sites. Examples are remote administration client software to control SQL databases, etc. This is needed to establish a platform for user training.

Ø  User training:

o   Course developers

o   Learning objectives

o   Product documentation

o   Training facilities

Ø  External announcement/publicity:

o   Getting noticed by web crawlers (keywords in META tags)

§  Submit-it

o   No cooperative advertising or banners for external sites will be shown on this site.

Ø  Initial operation and maintenance: This includes switching of DNS entries to activate the site.

Ø  Review initial web trend states: This allows tuning of performance in each area: posting, network performance, site performance. The methodology includes consolidation of logs, summary of data, charting and comparison of actual versus baseline performance.

Ø  Post-implementation analysis: This includes interviewing of all those involved in the project and impacted by it.

Ø  Post-Implementation review (budget vs. actual, traffic stats, lessons learned, extensions)

Ø  Upgrading (next cycle of phases)

Answers to Questions:

1. What are the beginning and end dates of your project?


     Beginning date: 1/02/2012

    End date: 2/8/2012

2. How many days will it take to complete the project?


    39 days including weekends. Reason being that the importance of the website to the institution cannot be     over-emphasized.


3. Does your project have a single critical path or multiple critical paths?


    my project have one critical path; The critical path of the project indicates that everything will be done sequentially until the first prototype deliverable is out. There isn't any shortcut to project.
    


4. What is the importance of the critical path?

it helps in indicating the shortest way to finish tasks in this project. Also it helps the project manager for better monitoring of the project progress. With this opportunity, necessary decisions can be taken to either speed up the project or slow it down.