Project Teamworker - Assignment Example

Team Team # Supervisor Rubric A Section/# Contents Section Introduction Project Section 2 Summary of Stakeholders Section 3 Implementation of Release Plan Scope Deliverables Limitations and Constraints Section 4 Quality Management Project TeamWorker: A Response to Real-World Business/Educational Need Section 1: Introduction Project Teamworker is designed to create a web-based portal that allows students, tutors, supervisors and unit coordinators that ability to monitor team projects effectively as they progress. Accordingly, the web-based platform would utilise different levels of access as a means of managing these group projects. This project has the added potential of assisting students in communicating with their other members in their team; sharing files, and assisting tutors, supervisors & unit co-ordinator in checking progress of these teams and providing oversight into their activities. Similarly, other team work based units can implement this system to control the team work process. Likewise, Teamworker will help students to do their projects well; because they do not need to utilize a number of different web based platforms (i.e. Facebook, Google Drive, DropBox etc) as a means of accomplishing a given task. Likewise, it promotes the overall efficiency and productivity of each member; as students no longer need to schedule a block of time in which they will all meet at a given geographic location and discuss the progress of their project. Project Description Teamworker is a web-based project that teams of up to six students to gain access to a platform that can facilitate the learning process and provide a level of oversight to those educators that seek to monitor it; prior to delivering a final grade. The benefits of such a platform are innumerable; however, perhaps the most important benefit has to do with the fact that the educators finally have a reliable means of measurement with regard to which team members did what and which team members did not pull their own weight for the project at hand. In terms of actual details that the portal requires, these are inclusive of team name/number, attribution of supervisors and/or tutors’ name as well required population of the project title, and finally a short description of the problem that the project seeks to address; in 100 words or less. After signing up, the team will receive an account number and password. Then, they will have access to their team page and update the team information or upload their assignments together with their meeting minutes. Moreover, as students can share their project files online, they can access the files easily and communicate with other members from only one website. A team can only have privileges and permissions to their only team pages; restricting their operations on the site to only their own team’s content. Yet, the tutors and supervisors can communicate and view the work progress of the teams they are assigned to. On the other hand the unit coordinator can edit and view the information of the teams as well as generate reports. Section 2: Summary of Stakeholders Obvious stakeholders within this process will be the students and those that are tasked with reviewing their performance; i.e. tutors, professors, and unit coordinators. As such, the student will rely upon the core functionality and ease of use of the site; as this will be an integral component to the actual quality of the work performed and the grade that is received at the end of the project. By means of comparison, both the individual students as well as individuals involved in educational oversight will demand that the site is secure and does not allow any level of unauthorized access by individuals that are not authorized to view information portrayed therein. The importance of this not only has to do with academic integrity but with respect to allowing the educational overseers to ensure that the work performed is an accurate measurement of effort expended on an individual basis. Section 3: Implementation of Release Plan: A web based system of this calibre will require several key components. Firstly, the establishment of a database; & web server will be necessary for the information to be represented to stakeholder and readily accessible by the stakeholders that have thus far been referenced previously within this analysis. Additionally, the system will need to be able to recognise different user groups and authenticate them. These different user groups will need to reflect inherently different privileges and permissions; based on their access rights. Scope The scope of the project will of course be confined to the development of the site in question. However, more specifically, it is absolutely necessary for the scope of the project to closely follow the outlines and deliverables at each and every juncture. For instance, many projects lose their way and fall into confusion based upon the fact that there is no clear goal or scope that they are to follow. Yet, in the case of the project in question, the goal and scope are contingent upon creating a working and usable/functional platform by which students and professors/educational stakeholders, can interact. In the event that any deliverable or other metric falls outside of this scope, then it must be dismissed and not included within the work that is slated to be performed. More specifically, the scope of the work will be specifically focused on “clean” HTML based website functionality; with linked data. The creation of plugin to integrate cleaning applet into Firefox will be accomplished. Likewise, designing and creating the interface for the plugin will also be required. “Light Search” features will be developed and “deep search” functionality will be tested prior to testing and showcasing the website via a variety of different marketing approaches. Exclusions: The scope of the work is not intended to work with flash; neither is it intended to be utilized alongside a modified HTML. Further, as it is most likely to be employed in a native environment on a laptop or desktop PC, it will not be modified for use with extensions; i.e. Android et al. Additionally, the working release will not be made commercially available and the plugins for other browsers will not be included in the initial releases (i.e. Safari, Chrome, Opera etc). Deliverables: Accordingly, the first set of deliverables is contingent upon determining the site address and reserving it online. The functionality of this is to ensure that the project can proceed without having to backtrack and fundamentally reconsider its name and/or approach to the business problem it is seeking to address. Secondly, an overview and outline of major metrics and goals that the site should engender will need to be crafted. This serves the primary function of allowing the developers to have a very clear and definite outline for what should be accomplished; inclusive of how and when. After this has been accomplished and the overall scope of the project is clear, it is then the responsibility of the site owner to ensure that adequate funding has been set aside to hire the subject matter expertise for coding the site, employing graphic artists, and establishing an effective marketing platform by which the stakeholders that have been previously referenced can be engaged and encouraged to try the site for themselves. The need for allocating sufficient focus on energy, personnel, and money required to effect the goals that have been set forward are every bit as integral as affecting the goals themselves; as these are the end resources that will be leveraged. Accordingly, if an insufficient level of resources are put forward for use, the project will not proceed to subsequent steps and will languish within one particular set of metrics until such a time as the money or energy of the personnel is exhausted. Assumptions and Constraints: It is assumed by the owners of the site that the current representation of technology creates the business opportunity for the web service in question. However, new technology could almost immediately reduce the need for this service or provide a better alternative in a relatively short period of time. Whereas it is expected that the current market will remain exhibited in much the same way it is now, this is an assumption that could be dangerous for the long term success of the site. Risk management can be conducted as a function of ensuring that an industry wide study is conducted prior to building the site or leveraging the services of subject matter experts; in the sense that unknown competition could create a short lived project that would not be beneficial to the outcome of the firm. Similarly, the most obvious constraint that the site faces is the constraint of monetary resources and not being able to develop the web platform, perform adequate industry wide research, and/or market the product/service to the degree that would allow for the highest level of profitability. Section 4: Quality Management Quality management will be accomplished by setting several roll out dates for website functionality and releasing these to targeted test groups prior to final release. The reason behind this phased approach has to do with the fact that prior studies have indicated that initial website launches suffer greatly from drawbacks relating to unexpected glitches or issues related to incorrect coding with the website; thereby deterring would-be consumers from using these alternatives and reverting to other existing and functional technology. Although costly, releasing the website in phased increments allows for the developers, graphic artists, marketing experts, and others to fully understand the nuances of how consumers will interact with the information presented on the website and how they will likely find utility and needs satisfaction in the services offered. After the initial releases have been accomplished and met the benchmarks of success denoted above, it will be necessary to have ongoing support available once the site launches. Regardless of the perfection of initial execution, it is doubtless that there will be overlooked aspects of coding, marketing, and/or graphic design that still need to be addressed. Whereas the needs will not likely be on the scale of work that was required when the site was being built, only a handful of individuals will be needed to be retained as a function of addressing these needs as they might arise. Read More