Company Overview - Essay Example

Company Overview St. Cloud s Information Technology Services is divided into five parts; Technology Support Services, Information Systems, Network and Infrastructure Services, Operational Support Unit and LRS data systems. Each section has its own services and is located in the James W. Miller Center. The company as a whole, focus on strategic alignment, initiative and project transparency, planning with campus units, improved service delivery, foster innovation, support mobility, enhance communications, and simplify support. These goals are set to improve services and planning. Purpose of Project Mr. Daryl Scholz is a project management coordinator that utilizes project management methodologies to plan, implement, and evaluate projects related to technology for the Information Technology Services department. Scholz works with numerous projects including, curriculum navigator, map works, student dashboard, centralized ticketing, web CMS, and the student portal. Even though Mr. Daryl Scholz is managing many projects, we narrowed it down to his latest accomplishment, the HuskeyNet Student Portal. The purpose of the HuskeyNet Student Portal Project was to create a user-friendly, customizable portal for student to use. It was student tested and students can implement ideas and suggestions to how or what they want the portal to have. Project Organization Chart Kostya Makarov – Portal Administrator Jeff Hennen – Systems Administrator Shawn Ellering – App Developer Josh Hjelmstad – App Developer Karin Duncan – Interface Work Casey Gordon – Product Owner Daryl Scholz – Scrum Master Portal Advisory Group – Cross dscholz@stcloudstate.edu functional group from across campus to 308-4825 gives direction Every project come with a challenge and the student portal did not escape to the rule. After working on the student health services and backing up thousands of student files. The student portal appeared at first sight to be an easier project. After meeting with different constituent and stockholder, they soon realize that the task was far from being a small project. Many aspects involved in this project was crucial to the success and satisfaction of students. “ K and his team developed a plan that will help reach their goals. A time has to be set for the project to be delivered as soon as possible for student to be able test and implement it by fall 2012 with a period set , of one year and half, the team started refining and giving life to the project. At first sight the project presented many strength and opportunities. Students were thrill by this new look and were anxious to come and see it coming alive. The student portal was a great opportunity for workers to expand their professional skills. Instead of using it the same skills over and over again they had to master software like java. Despite K and his team was still worried about some weakness and threats that may appear along the way .To develop the student portal difficult softwares with open sources, have to be used . While working on the project Mnscu was developing a similar portal at the state scale that could conflit with scsu student portal. To avoid the duplication of efforts they have to reset the main goal of this project. The Goal of this project had to be strictly established according to student’s needs. The student portal was supposed to give sources of information specific to each student while giving a dynamic vision of the website. In order term the goal was to make sure that students receive their email keep up with their schedule while knowing all about the different culture night on campus. The goal being set, Student started getting involved, and voice up their needs. To ensure that quality was met student testers were chose to follow the different steps of the project. Money and funds being crucial elements for the survival of any project, did not affected the feasibility of the project. The student portal funds were already available and ready to get to used . Using the student technology fee to fund the project was a plus for the school. Student felt having a contribution in technology improvement of their school. In order terms student money was use to serve their own needs and make the school grow. The funds directly established the scope of the project. No matter all the possibilities that this project was offering, the student portal should not be sidetracked. It has to be a straight one stop for students and faculties information. K has to form his team to be up to the task and ready to act as fast as possible. Communication was soon found to be the best tools use by the team. Every morning the team start having daily stand ups to re energize the department and make sure that everybody was up to speed. With the scrums master method the team was able to speak openly about the obstacles and challenges and together overcome it. Lessons learned There were a few lessons learned on the student portal project. This project was carried out using the agile methodology (scrum) instead the more traditional waterfall approach that has been used in the past. It proved to be effective because this project was based on developing a “one stop shop” as directly related to each student, and so, it required adaptive planning, evolutionary development and delivery, and encourages rapid and flexible response to change. It also promoted foreseen interactions throughout the development cycle. A 3-week sprint was organized and there were 3 days a week stand ups but in the last six weeks prior to the commencement of the fall semester, these went to daily standups. It involved creating “port lets” and asking the students to come up with stories which were what they wanted to see on the portal. Examples include; knowing where the buses are at a particular point in time, if there is an available washer and dryer in the residence halls, if there is an available packing spot, etc. There was also quite an ample amount of difficulty involved in tailoring the portal to meet each student’s unique need and so advisory group and the technical team had to come together and decide what should be worked on. A major challenge of the project was switching from Microsoft shop to open source access. This was a major change and involved using java which the team were not acclimatized to. This provided the greatest threat to the project, for they were not adequately prepared for it, and it wasn’t as easy to deal with the problems encountered due to the unfamiliarity with the entire process. Most of the team members were also working on other projects at the time, only one person was fully dedicated to the project and this also was a big challenge, given that there was a time constraint for the portal to be launched at the beginning of fall 2012 semester. During the summer there was a lot of work done and the team had to work round the clock alongside carrying out their various duties. The major threat for the project was making sure the e-services provided by MNSCU were not duplicated making some of the services redundant. They were also at the same time updating their services so it involved trying to figure out what they will come up next. Students were involved early on in the project and this really helped shaped the project and give direction as at when needed. They attended the scrum meetings and were encouraged to communicate their thoughts and needs and this was crucial in shaping the entire project. Student testers were used for testing and quality assurance. Some initial testing is done before the portal is released but the student testers are heavily relied on. There is no other testing and quality inspection being done outside of these. The scrum master also faced some challenges in coercing and motivating the team. His major task involved communication and organization and not having a dedicated team made things more challenging. Peer mentality was used to motivate those lagging behind, team members were encouraged to speak up if they felt someone wasn’t pulling their weight or if they had any ideas they needed to share with the rest of the team. Having students attend the daily scrum meetings also was a source of motivation for the team; they got immediate feedbacks which were encouraging and the student also provided ideas that shaped the project daily. A few things that would be done differently is better preparing for the open source process, training the team in java programming language, and having more people from the campus body more involved in the advising group. Even though the advisory group consists of people from different departments on campus, most of the departments like faculty members, student bodies are not well represented. Also having a student involved in the entire technical process, having them been involved fully in the project is definitely something that could have been more beneficial because having them was indeed a huge advantage. There are still a lot of opportunities for the project. There are about 130 stories in the backlog already provided by the students and about seventy- five percent are executable. There is still a lot that can be achieved and also system improvement. With the team getting more familiarized with the new system, the project will see a big improvement. General student feedback are also been collected to better assess the product. Conclusion The basic objective of the company was to improve the service and planning of the I.T. services delivered across the university and other units. Though the company through its project management team delivered various projects however, this is related with the HuskeyNet Student Portal which project attempted to develop and deliver as a one stop shop for students and faculty of the university. At first this project seems easier however as the project management started to coordinate with other stakeholders, it became clear that this project will require substantial effort, time and investment to develop it to a point where it delivers its intended objectives. With set timeline, project started to work on delivering its goals and moved in new direction to achieve its overall objectives. The first challenge for the team was to learn to use Java as project shifted from using Microsoft and utilized open source technologies to develop the project. Since the project was mainly for further improving the information sourcing for students to provide them ready access to emails, scheduling and other activities therefore it also started to take feedback from students. Students also served as strong motivation for other team members who were also working on other projects. The project used agile methodologies and actively involved all the stakeholders besides ensuring that activities are not duplicated across the organization by developing new systems. It is critical to note however, that project team did not involve students and other stakeholders fully which could have resulted into improvement of overall deliverables for the project. Read More